Phantom Banjo (33 page)

* * *

That wet, dark road seemed a thousand miles
long to Brose as he picked his way back down one lane, on the wrong
side of the road. His lights blinked out—a short caused by the
rain, probably, but he wasn't going to let that slow him down. He
woke up Faron and asked him if he had a flashlight.

"Yeah, sure, but why?"

"So I can see where the hell I'm going,"
Brose said. His voice quavered with cold from his dunking and
tension from the long drive.

"You okay?"

"Just barely. The road was washed out back,
there. And while you folks were sleeping, I saw another one . .
."

"Another what?"

"Spook. It came up from the bottom of that
river to warn us not to go across. Jesus! They seem to mean well
but I wish to God they'd just hang out a sign or something instead
of havin' to make personal appearances. I waded in after the damn
thing before I realized it was a spook."

"Did the ghost knock the lights out too?"

"Nah, that just happened. You got that
flashlight?"

Faron dug through the pocket on the door of
the van. "Right here."

"Shine it out the window, huh? So's I can see
the edge of the road. I don't want no more ghosts comin' up out of
the ditches to tell me I'm about to go off the road or
somethin'."

The blinkers cast a little light too. Brose
remembered that there had been an exit for a truck stop about
twenty miles back. When he saw the first halo of neon through the
rivulets on the windshield and the darkness and the pulse of his
blinkers and the whooshing wipers, he thought they looked like
those will-o'-the-wisp things, or the Marfa Ghost Lights down near
the Big Bend, mysterious and aloof and awfully still and quiet in
such a thunderous gully-washer of a night.

By the time the words on the sign were
legible, he had bypassed the exit ramp and had to back up and make
another run at it, Faron shining the light every which way to make
sure Brose had some notion where the road was.

Three eighteen-wheelers sat like drowsing
dinosaurs to one side of the big diesel pumps. Brose pulled in to
one side of them.

Faron said, "Now that we're off the road, let
me get my tool kit out and we can probably fix whatever's wrong . .
."

"Not a whole lot I expect," Brose said, and
twisted the knob for the lights again, experimentally. Two strong
beams flooded the pavement in front of them.

"Sure you had them switched on before?"

"Hell yes, I'm sure. They died all at once.
Better check 'em before we leave anyway. Must be a short in there
someplace."

"After a hamburger and a pit stop," Ellie
said, climbing out the back and splashing down into a puddle on the
pavement to follow the comforting smell of hot fried food poking
teasing tendrils of fragrance through the rain torrents.

By the time they reached the cafe, they were
all nearly as wet as Brose. Anna Mae and Ellie headed for the
women's room, Brose and Hawkins for the men's. Faron stood
awkwardly by the cashier's desk.

"Excuse me, ma'am, has anybody said anything
about the road being washed out down the way?" he asked the
ponytailed cashier, who didn't look as if she were more than a
sophomore in high school. She had been stooped down below the
counter, unpacking boxes of small, cheap teddy bears and sitting
them on the shelves beneath clips full of multicolored bandannas
that fluttered slightly from the draft blowing around the
glassed-in front door.

"No, nobody has but there hasn't been a whole
lot of traffic."

"Well, you might want to warn folks. Up the
road about twenty miles."

"Thanks. I'll mention it. What weather, huh?"
Behind her he could see the waitress mopping tables while three
truckers, two men and a woman, sat drinking coffee and talking.

"No kidding."

The others emerged from the bathrooms.

Anna Mae had fallen into step with Brose, who
was telling her about the flood and the ghost. Her head was down,
black hair swaying like the silk fringes on a dance shawl as she
walked, nodding to show she was listening while she focused on the
floor and his words.

Ellie and Hawkins were still asking questions
as they slid into their booth but Anna Mae approached the truckers
before taking her seat. "Hi," she said.

One nodded a greeting, another gave a rather
numb smile, and the woman said, as if afraid Anna Mae was going to
pass out Bible tracts, "Hello," very cautiously.

"Just thought you people might want to know,
we turned back from a flash flood across the road about twenty
miles west of here."

' "That's funny," said the larger of the two
men, who was swarthy, Mexican, or Indian maybe, with long hair
caught up in a rubber band at the back of his neck. "I was just by
there, oh, maybe two hours ago. It was fine then."

"That's why they call them 'flash' floods I
guess," the other man said.

The woman, a carefully coiffed blonde who had
the delicate features and clear creamy complexion of many plump
women, glanced from one man to the other a little anxiously and
fingered the crystal in the neckline of her pink-and-purple plaid
shirt. "Strange weather for this time of year though—I mean, that
hot spell wasn't supposed to break."

"Now, Naomi," said the other man, older and
with a grizzled white crew cut, "I never did know weather to do
what it was supposed to, did you?"

"It's not just that. It's—I don't know—it
feels funny. Like that tanker we saw last night."

"That so?" Anna Mae said.

"Yeah," the older man said, "it was a little
funny and Naomi here, she's sensitive to that kind of stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Well, you know, on these long straight
stretches, you can see quite a ways, but it was like, for miles
there was nothing ahead of us and then this rig—"

"Not like any tanker I've ever seen," the
woman said. "I don't think those flashing lights it had on the back
were regulation either, Opie."

"You said that, hon. She did," he told Anna
Mae and the other man. " 'Opie,' she says to me, 'lookit them funny
lights on that rig. What does he think he's doin'? That station
wagon is followin' him so close looks to me like it would get
confused.' I said maybe it was his wife or a friend or something
but when we stopped outside of Scottsbluff I pulled up alongside
him. Didn't see the driver in the tanker, but the truck was fueling
up. And there was a woman in the Ford, okay, but she looked
half-asleep and there was three other grown folks with her, all
fast asleep. Now, I am a man who always minds my own business,
Naomi can tell you that, can't you, hon? But I couldn't help it, I
said to the woman, 'Lady, I been watching you and you better get
some sleep or you're going to have an accident.' She didn't pay me
any more attention than if I was the pump talkin' to her though.
Just filled up, stuck her gas card in the pump—it was one of them
newfangled kind where you pay the pump direct with your credit
card—and waited until the truck left."

"Yeah and I never did see the driver get back
in either," the woman said. "Opie tried to raise him on the CB but
he was off the air. We followed 'em maybe another five-ten miles or
so and she never got off his tail."

"Would have followed 'em longer but—well, I
was wonderin' so hard about it that I left my gas card back at
Kearney and we had to turn back. We sorta looked for 'em when we
got back on the highway—you can meet a lot of folks coming and
going over and over out here, but if they pulled over again, or
were still on the road, we never caught up with 'em. Course, they
might have got off the main highway, taken a side route."

"What did the woman look like?" Anna Mae
asked.

" 'Bout my age," Opie said. "Curly hair. Was
wearin' shorts and had good legs. Course, I wouldn't have noticed
except it worried Naomi. She's sensitive about these things, like I
said. She's in trainin' to be a transmedium."

Naomi stared modestly into her coffee cup and
fingered her crystal in a sensitive sort of way. "Oh, Opie. There's
no training about it. It's a gift, I tell you. I'm just sort of
developing it, between runs, and listening to the subliminal tapes,
you know?" She looked back up at Anna Mae. "I was just sure I felt
something coming from that. Once, crossing where it used to be the
Lewis and Clark Trail, Sacajawea spoke through me, I'm sure. She
wanted to tell Opie that he was about to have a flat and sure
enough—"

"Well, thank you very much. I mean, that's
very interesting," Anna Mae said. "You didn't by any chance see it
farther down the road?"

"Nope," Opie said.

"Well, watch out for that flood."

"Tell you what, I'll let the bears know and
find out if one of the alternate routes is open for you," Opie
said.

"Thank you."

"No problem. Thanks for the warnin'."

Anna Mae returned to the table. Brose was
giving Ellie and Hawkins a brief version of what he'd seen at the
flood. When he was done, Anna Mae repeated her conversation with
the truckers. Faron widened his eyes for a moment and stared into
his coffee cup with a look of "Oh, well. Now what?" but everyone
was too travel-weary to do more than wonder to themselves.

Ellie bought a MAD magazine and she and Faron
stared at it and smirked once in a while. Otherwise, the night and
the rain drizzled away while Hawkins, Anna Mae, and the Randolphs
sat drinking coffee and made frequent trips to the toilets. Brose
snored on the table with his head cradled on his crossed arms.

The rain stopped sometime around four A.M.
Anna Mae saw Opie go to his truck and return. At seven-thirty he
left again but this time when he returned he stopped at their table
and said to Hawkins, who was the oldest-looking white man there,
"They're patchin' the pavement up ahead right now, mister, and if
you and your friends want to keep goin', they've made a stretch
passable. We're gonna honk on now, if you want to follow us."

Opie and Naomi kept on Highway 80 bound for
Ogden but Anna Mae decided to take 30 into Pocatello instead. If
the truckers hadn't seen Gussie's station wagon again on 80, then
chances were they had sidetracked. If they were headed directly for
Tacoma, Ogden would be out of their way, even if the road was a
little better. She thought as she saw the big rig pull away that
she really should have mentioned the ghosts to Naomi. They'd have
made her week.

* * *

The rains had hit the whole area hard. The
highway was littered with stones, driftwood, and other debris and
the roadside was studded with yellow diamond signs featuring more
silhouettes of flagmen and men with shovels and more signs saying
Men Working, Slow, Danger, or Merge. Although the rain had stopped,
the sky was still overcast and the wind buffeted the van as it
rolled through the straight stretches unprotected by trees. Still,
there was plenty of traffic headed their direction and with any
luck they should be in Boise or even La Grande before nightfall.
From there to Portland and on to Tacoma, where the roads would be
too well traveled for any more ghosts or the pranks of evil
spirits. Except for drunk drivers, there should be nothing to worry
about.

An ominous rhythmic thunking sound from the
left front end brought Anna Mae back to the present. For a moment,
she entertained the vain hope that the noise was made by the tires
bumping over the cracks in the road but of course, it wasn't.

* * *

As darkness fell the wind rose howling down
the mountain roads, past the muddied mechanical monsters parked for
the night, their clawed shovels and tar sprayers poised until they
were manned again in the morning by members of the operating
engineers local. Where the road wound round the side of one
mountain, the wind levitated the yellow sign that said Danger, and
later another that said Road Closed and another that said Soft
Shoulder and yet another that cautioned Avalanche Area Beware of
Falling Rock. The signs lifted on the wings of the gale and swept
down the mountainside just before the treads of three old tires and
one new one on a beat-up van rolled over the freshly graveled road.
The first sign landed in the bushes a few yards down the cliff. The
second floated facedown along the stream flowing far below in a
cleft between the mountains. The third tumbled over and over like a
weed in the wind and was never found by anyone anywhere ever again.
But the last sign swooped like a bat to land on a 141-year-old
grave whose marker had long ago been blown or carried as far from
its intended resting place as the road signs.

From the place where the last sign had risen
on the wind, the hiss of small pebbles and soft dirt sliding
downhill was drowned out by the wind, though as the bigger slabs of
dirt, rock, and concrete gave way, the rumble was audible to anyone
standing outside, listening for it. But it could not be heard, for
instance, over the growl of the overworked engine of a large
vehicle and the howl of the wind and the staticky weather report
issuing from the car radio.

But where the rocks and dirt and stones and
slabs landed on or beside that last sign, they disturbed what had
lain beneath that unmarked ground, and the remembered fear and
panic sparked a fragment of the consciousness that sharp rocks and
the flailing hooves of oxen had once torn limb from limb. Soon the
wind was joined by another wailing and while all else sailed
downward, hideous disjointed forms lifted toward the disintegrating
curve of highway.

* * *

It should have been Faron's turn to drive,
but he had had to wake up to deal with the flat tire, with the
spare that was also flat, and with rolling the tire to the nearest
service area and waiting while they called for a matching tire from
the next largest town. Meanwhile, Anna Mae had slept so she
insisted that she wanted to drive for a while longer and make up
the lost time, and would wake Faron when she grew tired.