Phantom Banjo (6 page)

"It's for your own protection, Juli," Josh
said, pressing the money into her hand. "Join up. You're not going
to get anywhere if you don't."

"We're not going to get anywhere if we do
either," George snapped, poking his head back in the door. "Come
on, Jules. I thought I saw a help wanted sign at McDonald's on the
way in."

Josh sighed as he watched them go. He did not
look forward to playing with a rockabilly band and he was sorry the
kids had to be let down. But he certainly wasn't going to blame
himself for their lack of foresight. At least Juli hadn't refused
the money.

* * *

"There," the woman said, "how's them
apples?"

"Huh?" the boy asked.

"How'd you like that story? Lots of high
finance and businesspeople—"

"Yeah, but the ending wasn't happy," the girl
complained. "When do the Martins invest the seed money Josh gave
them, make a killing on junk bonds, join the Equity, get lots of
jobs in big places, and live happily ever after?"

"They don't."

"But that man, Josh, told her . . ."

"He was wrong, I'm afraid. They did try to
join the Equity later, with the money he'd given Julianne, but the
Equity was more interested in interrogating them about gigs they'd
played illegally, and fining them for it, than they were about
making them members and getting them jobs."

The little girl who knew
about geography sniffed. "Too bad the Martins didn't know about the
laws Equity was passing in time
to use our
government's mechanisms for protesting laws they didn't
like."

"Oh, they and a few other folks did. They
signed petitions, wrote a few letters. But mostly when it all
started they were on the road, pooped from trying to keep up, make
a living. The devils had their people in key positions in the
Equity, the courts, and Congress. Those minions knew exactly the
right way to get to the musicians with boring language and stupid
wrangling. If say, the devils had hired people with guns or gotten
the police to lock them all up for disturbing the peace or
something, why, it would have been just like the head devil said.
The singers would have written a passel of new songs about the
great struggle' and would have defended themselves eloquently.
Every good singer is at least half actor and thrives on drama. What
they can't take is being ground down, bored into oblivion by
bureaucracy. So for starters, the devils had their minions
introduce sneaky little bills that had to be nagged down over and
over by boring petitions and writing letters to the same tired
congressmen about the same old bills with thus-and-such new
attachments each time. That's just the kind of fighting singers are
real bad at."

The boy shrugged. "It sounds like a mere
labor and management dispute to me. Josh got to be management—"

"Only he wasn't," the sister said. "He
belonged to the Equity and wanted them to. He directly opposed
management interests in general by insisting the Martins do
something that would cause extra work, time, and money for the
employer, when he could have used the company's band instead."

The woman thought these were the damndest
children she had ever run across, or she would have thought so had
she not met other kids like them lately. The way they argued
business deals and who was squashing whom was maybe no worse than
in her day, when kids shot each other with toy bazookas when they
played soldier or toy pistols when they played cowboy, but the
enthusiasm of these children was far more ruthless, in a cold,
anemic kind of way.

"You 're both wrong," she said. "Josh and the
Martins were both labor, only they forgot that. The devils and the
bureaucrats had successfully managed to make them think they had
different businesses. The Equity laws defeated people like the
Martins and the immigration laws, under the guise of controlling
drug traffic, kept out people like the Scottish singer the Chaveses
were bringing in, until there were just a few big-name people left
singing anything at all. Which made everybody separate and a little
mad at each other. Which made each and every one of them all that
much easier to pick off when the devils were ready to pounce. The
immigration laws not only kept people like the Scot out, it kept
all the American singers in. Even Canada wouldn't allow them to
play there anymore, much less Europe, once it was learned how the
U.S. was 'protecting' the rights of its performers."

"But what happened to Juli?" another little
girl wanted to know. "If she was so beautiful and so good surely
she rose into a management position in some large corporation
and—"

"I'll get back to her," the woman
promised.

"After the cowboys," the boy said. "I wanted
to hear about the cowboys spe-siff-ick-lee."

His sister rolled her eyes at the woman. "Now
you've got him talking like you."

He stuck his tongue out at her and looked
expectantly at the woman.

"Can't imagine why you're interested," the
storyteller teased. "Cowboys are nothin' but no-account
agricultural laborers, after all."

"You promised," he said indignantly.

"Well, okay, if you're sure. Tell you what.
Tomorrow's Saturday. If you meet me at the park by the slide I'll
see if I can recollect that part too."

* * *

They didn't recognize her at first because
she was pushing a toddler on the swings and at the same time
minding a baby in a pram. She was dressed like the other mothers in
bright colored soft fleece exercise clothes—in her case the polo
shirt and matching sweatpants were a lavender blue that chased the
shadows from her eyes and made them the same color, made her old
gray curls look like designer hair.

Since the children's various nannies and
baby-sitters tended to sit together for their own gossip session in
the park, it was no trouble to get away to the play area. As soon
as they arrived, she picked up the toddler and sat down on the
swing herself with the kid in her lap.

"Now then," she said. "Where were we?"

"The cowboys," the boy said, glaring at his
sister, daring her to ask for anything else.

But the boy and his sister and the other kids
soon forgot about each other or anything but the woman swinging and
rocking the baby, weaving a story, using their imaginations to give
life to her memories.

CHAPTER 4

After thirty years traveling the country
singing the folk songs of the land, Willie MacKai was right back
where he started from and if anybody had been fool enough to ask
him how he felt about it, he'd have told them he liked it that way,
right after he told them to mind their own damn business. Willie
had been brought up in this ranch country, shooting rattlers off
the hot rocks, breathing the dust into his nostrils, learning not
only the traditional cowboy songs but the songs of the Mexican
vaqueros who worked for his father. His father had been foreman of
the spread where Willie worked now as a guide and a guard for room,
board, and whiskey and cigarette money.

He'd been a mess when the boss had taken him
on and he knew he only had the job thanks to his old man. He'd
counted on that, since his dad had worked for Lafitte Ranch most of
Willie's life and was known to be so indispensable that when the
old man died, fifteen new hands had to be put on to take his place.
Willie also counted on his own past reputation. The boss had always
enjoyed watching him perform. That had almost worked against him
though.

"I dunno, son," the boss said. "Place has
changed some since you was a kid. I need somebody who's going to
stick around. Not much high life out here, no women except Conchita
the cook and she weighs three hundred fifty pounds if she weighs an
ounce. Not what you're used to."

"What I'm used to ain't what I want anymore,
Lenny," Willie told him. He was slumped half down in his chair with
a whiskey in one hand and his hundred-dollar hat in the other,
fanning the hat back and forth—not to cool himself; Leonard
Lafitte's office was air-conditioned. Just nerves. "I need to
settle down, have a place to live and a steady job."

"No woman?"

"No one woman," he said, grinning like a
lobo. "Can't see depriving all them others."

He was being careful to keep it light, not to
beg, but Lenny was shaking his head. "Naw, Willie, you're too good
at what you—"

Willie set the drink carefully on the edge of
the mahogany desk. The shine of the wood showed through the layer
of dust. "Sure I am. I'm too good. You know how much good bein' too
good's done me, Lenny? I'll tell you. I haven't worked in six
months. I had to sell grandma's farm she left me to pay bills two
years ago. I have thirty-five dollars to my name. You know how long
I've been on the road, Lenny? Thirty years, that's how long. Thirty
years of never missing a gig, no matter how hard I had to travel to
get there. Thirty years of working even when I was sick or hurt.
Thirty years of helping some young guy who thought I was terrific,
wanted to be just like me, and watching him make the money and get
the fame and forget he ever knew me when I could have used a break
too. Thirty years of singing songs I think are true and strong and
make this country a better place to be in. And watching left-wing
bastards take all the bows for telling the American people that
they're shit. It's been thirty goddamn years too long, Lenny. I
want me a real job."

Lenny rubbed his bald spot with the heel of
his hand, pulled a set of keys out of a drawer, and slid them
across the desk to Willie. "Your dad was the best man I had,
Willie, and it ain't been the same around here since he died. I
know you been doin' something else but I also know you're a chip
off the old block. Job's yours, son, and I'm happy to have you.
Just hope it makes you happy."

It had, for a while. For a while, nothing
felt very different. Willie covered maybe 100-200 miles a day in a
Jeep, patrolling the borders, the line shacks, the fences. He kept
his eyes open and his gun loaded for parties of the new
wetbacks—not harmless poor Mexicans in serapes and sandals, but
well-fed-looking people in brand-new Nikes and designer jeans,
carrying their worldly goods in waterproof Gucci nylon overnight
bags. He hadn't found any, and used the firearms mostly for snakes
and signaling, or occasionally having to put an injured animal
down. But roaring across the miles spanned by Lafitte Ranch, going
back to his messy den of a house at night to drink in front of the
television, not having to sing over a bunch of rowdy drunks and
singing only when he felt like it, which wasn't often anymore, it
took him a while to realize that the life he'd lived since he quit
college was over.

It had been two years since he worked. The
only performance he gave these days was the line of bullshit he fed
the stockholders he took on hunting trips for havalina and
whitetail deer. He'd always said he could fall back on hunting if
he had to, survive the way he had survived as a twelve-year-old
kid, when it was his job to put meat on the table. Well, here he
was, buttering up two or three rich men who didn't have to hunt to
put meat on their tables and who seemed to consider him a cross
between a native porter and the local quaint character.

Well, fuck 'em. He lit another cigarette,
poured another drink, and slumped back in the chair facing his
television. Despite the air-conditioning, it was hot in his little
house. He wore a pair of cutoffs and nothing else. His tan had
darkened at face and forearms, faded everywhere else. The pool was
for family members only, and besides, he worked a lot of
fourteen-hour days now. You'd think a man could sleep, working like
that, but he sat up half the night watching television, just for
the voices. Ranch work wasn't what it used to be. Most of the other
men were married, living in the town Lafitte built for them to live
in with their families. Some were taking night classes at the ranch
town's college extension branch, bettering themselves. Like he had.
For all the good it did him.

He was halfway through his third whiskey and
diet cola when the phone rang, and Mark Mosby, who he hadn't seen
in five years, told Willie that he needed to talk to him so
urgently he was driving down from Austin immediately.

"What's it all about, buddy?" Willie asked
him soothingly, responding to the teary note in Mark's rich
baritone voice. Mark was one of those "sensitive" guys who tended
to cry when they got upset. Willie only cried when he got real
tanked and maudlin.

But Mark also tended to get secretive when he
was in trouble, and now he said, "I'll tell you all about it when I
get there. I—I guess I'll need a banjo lesson, for one thing. But
for now, give me the directions to the ranch."

* * *

Mark Mosby barreled down the highway from
Austin with a troubled mind and a strangely jangling banjo in the
seat beside him. He wished he'd gotten the case for it so it
wouldn't be so distractingly noisy. Was it his imagination or did
the accidental reverberation of the strings make up a tune that
vaguely resembled the old Woody Guthrie song "Hard Traveling"? Not
that Mark thought traveling was especially hard. He liked it.
Driving was a sort of meditation for him and if he ever needed to
meditate, it was now. According to his watch it was barely six
o'clock, not yet twenty-four hours since he'd decided to give
himself a treat on a gig-less night and go to a concert.

He didn't usually treat himself to concerts
by other pickers. They made him uncomfortable. For one thing, he
wanted to be up there singing himself, wanted the applause to be
his. For another thing, he'd rather be a player than a spectator.
For another thing, he just couldn't help getting a little jealous
of any other musician, especially an acoustic musician, who had a
wide-enough audience to draw a concert crowd. He knew he was good
enough to fill the halls, if only he could get producers to listen
to him, to promote him. His voice was better than the voices of
most concert stars and his accompaniment better than average.
Furthermore, he was a showman, and would have been an idiot not to
see how people responded to him, especially women. Yet somehow all
the big breaks had eluded him—at least so far. So normally it made
him twitchy to watch someone else perform.