Phantom Banjo (32 page)

"Oh, God," Gussie said, and did a forward
belly flop spanning the front seat and grabbed for his ankle. She
could reach only the sole of his shoe. Willie scrambled into the
front seat and lunged out onto the hood, tackling him around the
waist with both arms.

"Hang on there, buddy," he said. But the
ranger took advantage of the leverage to stabilize himself, let go
of the mirror, and got a good grip on the wrecker frame. At that
point the lane of traffic the wrecker was in moved suddenly forward
and his arms were almost jerked off before he let go to avoid being
scraped off on the side of the fuel truck in front of them and be
pulled off.

Willie was still hanging on to him and they
were both dragged toward the hood but now Gussie grabbed the
steering wheel with one hand and Willie with the other. The wrecker
on the left was replaced by another fuel tanker, and as it drove
up, Willie and the ranger caught a glimpse of what was in the
driver's seat.

The ranger vomited onto the side of the fuel
truck before he allowed himself to be hauled back inside the
station wagon. All three sat panting for a while.

Willie patted his captor on the shoulder and
said, "Relax, man."

"So, MacKai. You still think we've died and
gone to hell?" he panted.

"I didn't say died," Willie corrected him,
"maybe more of a reverse direct ascension. But that was a fool
stunt. Going directly to hell is one thing. Getting maimed is
another. Anyway, you saw what happened. They ain't about to let us
out of this with nothing more than a few Steve McQueen moves. And
even if you and I could get out, what about Gussie and the
girl?"

"We'd get help."

"Where? We don't know that there is any help.
Did you get a look at what's driving that second tanker? Take a
gander, my friend."

The man leaned out the windshield again and
peered up but the truck had pulled too far forward and all he could
see was the smooth side of the tanker. On the other side, the log
chain creaked and clanked with the strain of holding the entire
load alone.

"You may not get much choice about being
maimed either," the ranger told Willie. He had to scoot toward the
spot between the seats to avoid the broken glass and the butt of
the log occupying the passenger seat. "I think it won't be too long
until that chain gives way and we find ourselves crushed beneath a
pile of oversize toothpicks."

"Tell you what. You worry about it for both
of us," Willie said, and climbed back up in the back, leaving
Gussie in the front again with the ranger.

"What did you see, Willie?" Gussie asked.

He just shook his head. No need to upset the
women. She persisted and finally he made a joke about the grim
reaper and rotting zombie corpses, but it didn't sound funny to any
of them. How could he explain that what he had really seen had
vanquished any doubt he had that they were on the road to hell and
while the pavement was as smooth as his good intentions had made
it, the company left a lot to be desired?

* * *

The station wagon lurched and Julianne woke
from a restless dream in which she was an angel whose wings had
gotten singed and she kept lurching out of control. The sensation
was intensified because her ears felt as if they needed to pop and
her internal gyroscope was befuddled so that even lying down, she
felt a sense of vertigo. Her face burned and ached, her eyes still
carried bright spots in front of them even in the darkened interior
of the station wagon, and she felt hot all over and thought she
probably had a fever. She had no idea how many hours they had been
trapped, how long it had been since the ranger had tried to climb
out the front window. Nothing much had happened since then, and
she'd gone to sleep expecting to die.

As she rolled onto her back, her hip touched
the banjo beside her. She smelled the diesel and exhaust, felt the
blast of wind through the windshield and saw the log poking through
the shattered passenger window.

The rim of the banjo bit into her leg as she
sat up into a lotus position, but she hoisted it onto her crossed
ankles and felt the strings vibrate under her fingers, and tried to
tell what it might be playing. Gussie's face was a study in
well-controlled terror, her eyes darting from one of the men to the
other, reading them, trying to see how she could head trouble off
at the next pass. The ranger was still shaking and pale, his face
sheened with sweat. Willie sat back against the seat with outward
calmness, his face less mobile than she had ever seen it, his whole
body poised from movement to movement as if listening—and perhaps
he was, to the banjo.

Juli shut them all out as she closed her
eyes, rested the backs of her hands on her knees, curled thumb to
forefinger on each hand, and shut out the trucks, shut out the
broken windshield, but somehow, even as she softly chanted a mantra
she could hear only in her mind, trying to gain access to her inner
self, the banjo kept intruding, drawing her fingers, demanding to
be heard.

It was very much like in Lucien's sessions,
except that this time she was doing it alone, using the power he'd
told her she had. She knew something was in the banjo, struggling
to make itself understood, something so strong it sent a thrill
through her nerve endings and up her spinal column. The banjo
vibrated against her and she could make out the beat of a tune,
though she could only identify the rhythm, not the melody. And in
her mind's eye, she saw Sam Hawthorne playing it again, his eyes
fixed on them, his mouth moving as if he was trying to tell them
something.

"Yes, Sam, yes?" she asked that inner image
and it regarded her thoughtfully, shrugged the imagined banjo over
its imagined shoulder, and signed to her, "Willie."

She opened her eyes. Gussie had been watching
her, watching her lashless, browless eyes close in that pink and
swollen face, salt tears streaming painfully down her burn-tender
cheeks as her lips moved.

But now the younger woman leaned forward,
banjo in one hand, and tapped Willie on the shoulder with the
other. "It's for you," she said.

* * *

Brose twiddled the dial on the radio from one
pitch of static to another until at last he found a lone scratchy
voice adrift in the noise at the extreme end of the lighted strip
of numbers. He turned the volume up high, although everyone else
was trying to sleep. He needed to hear over the slap of his
windshield wipers and the hiss of rain, the howl of the wind
tearing across the broad flat plain of the valley floor. Sometime
before the clouds started rolling in, ganging up, and gushing rain
on top of them, there'd been mountains not too far off. Now the
whole world had narrowed down to the torrents of water pouring over
his windshield, the metronome of the wiper blades, and the faint
fan of wet pavement his high beams illuminated. He had hummed what
he could remember of "Bobby McGee," which wasn't a hell of a lot,
for the last two hundred miles.

No other cars had approached for hours, and
no one shared his lane. He reckoned he and his friends must be the
only fools in the world going where they were going.

"Storm warnings are in effect for northern
and western Wyoming, most of Montana and throughout Idaho and
eastern Washington with high winds and flash floods possible in
low-lying areas."

"You think that's news!" Brose demanded
aloud. "Man, I don't need you guys to tell me that. All I gotta do
is look out the window here at all this wet stuff."

He drove on and the road became full of
little streamlets. He got used to seeing water on the road. So when
his headlights picked up the edge of the next rain-covered spot he
slowed down so he wouldn't go into a skid but kept driving
cautiously. He stopped, however, when he saw that this particular
spot was several yards wide. It was probably only runoff, of
course, and no more than an inch or two deep, and there was no
other way to get across. For a moment he sat there idling the
motor, and thought he'd chance it. The van sat fairly high off the
ground so it would take pretty deep water to do more than dampen
the tires.

Then suddenly, just where the lights faded
into blackness, the water rippled toward him and something pale
gleamed in it, then popped above the surface.

A human head? Yes. It rose so he could see
shoulders, a chest, arms reaching from the water, then the trunk,
hips—and finally, the guy waded out and stood right in front of the
hood. Young guy, no more than about twenty, but soaked and pale. A
fellow motorist who'd mistaken the depth of the stream, perhaps? He
didn't look scared though, just sad and kind of worried, standing
there shaking his head.

Brose rolled down the window. "Buddy, you
okay? Looks like you were luck—"

But the young man gave him one last sad look
that seemed full of warning and backed back into the stream, wading
until he was covered to the knees, the hips, the waist.

Brose flung wide the door of the van and
waded into the pool after the fellow. "Wait a minute, man, this is
no damn place to take a fuckin' bath!" he yelled, but the man was
up to his neck by then and sank back into the deep. Brose
floundered in after him, but his foot stepped into nothingness and
his head went under. He surfaced, took a deep breath, and dived
again, flinging out his arms to try to make contact with the man,
but he could see nothing. Surfacing once more, he saw the man
standing beside the truck, beckoning again. In a couple of crawl
strokes, Brose was back on solid ground and slogged dripping back
toward the truck. By then, the pedestrian had vanished.

As Brose climbed back in the truck, he saw
the pedestrian's head sink once more into the flooded portion of
the road. Brose reached into the back and pulled his flea-bitten
horse blanket up to wrap around him as he sat shivering, looking at
where the man had been, at the pool into which he had been about to
drive and in which they might all have drowned. As he realized the
possibilities, what would have happened if he hadn't stopped for
the phantom stranger, his shivering became more intense. "Sheeit,"
he said to himself.

"Something wrong?" Hawkins roused from his
nap long enough to ask.

"Not a goddamn thing backtracking a hundred
miles won't take care of," Brose said, and roared backward, made a
wide U-turn, and headed back the way they'd come.

CHAPTER 15

"Okay, who's responsible for the spooks?" the
Chairdevil wanted to know. "S&I, is this another of your
superstitions? Don't you think you could have checked it out with
me?"

"Or me?" Doom and Destruction asked. "Our
Acts of God branch is not going to be pleased to have a wonderful
flood like that just dribble away without claiming a single victim.
We could have had that little group right there if it hadn't been
for that—that being you decided to play Halloween with on our
time."

"Hey, he wasn't mine," the Stupidity and
Ignorance Devil said. "Or at least if he is, the hauntings
department didn't tell me they was sending him in. Not that last
guy, neither. So far as I know, them guys is two unaffiliated
free-lance spirits."

The Chairdevil changed the subject. He knew
who the first spirit was, of course, and had assumed the fellow was
now one of theirs but if so, he had not, apparently, been acting
under orders unless someone screwed up. As for the second, he'd
have to think on that awhile longer.

What was annoying him now was that group with
the banjo, who should have been reduced to gibbering terror by now.
Of course, perhaps even he was out of touch with just how bad
modern freeways were, and most of them were musicians and used to
driving; still, you'd think the logging truck and the pipes and so
on should do it. Really, that policeman was the only one behaving
like a normal human being.

Willie was proving quite a disappointment.
Nicholson had offered him any number of opportunities to run true
to type—shallow, self-centered, self-indulgent, and
self-destructive—but something seemed to be delaying the
inevitable. Instead of falling apart, as the man had on numerous
less stressful occasions, he seemed to be getting his act together,
and so far as Nicholson could tell, he wasn't even thinking about
booze or getting into the girl's pants. He didn't seem to be
thinking about much except whatever it was that fool instrument was
playing at the moment.

And the girl! He was going to have to speak
to her guidance counselor, who was supposed to have been softening
her up for recruitment, turning her wish to dabble in necromancy
and her budding conceit about psychic powers into something that
could shape itself into greed, power hunger, and the despising of
everyone else. He'd had a good start too, he knew from her little
song, but something was going wrong here too. These wretched people
didn't behave properly at all—every time you thought you had them
committed to the course you needed, they slipped away, about as
easy to herd as a bunch of amoebas.

Oh, well, that was why they were so
dangerous, wasn't it? He should have tried more direct means, he
supposed, as he had with the "stars" among them. He hadn't expected
such nobodies to be so difficult. Of course, some of that failure
to conform to expectations was what kept them nobodies instead of
allowing them to become "stars" too. Too bad he couldn't do
anything direct about the banjo but any number of his other booby
traps should take care of the others. Was that dratted banjo
enhancing the power of the little snatches of songs the idiots
could remember? Whatever it was, he felt sure it was a minor
problem. The van full of people would succumb to the road, one way
or another, and as for the others, they were already, as the old
comic books had so poetically put it, in the clutches of doom,
banjo and all. If he couldn't actually kill them and destroy the
instrument, he could at least keep them trapped in the
custom-designed hell he had created with them in mind.