Phantom Banjo (9 page)

He meant to make one of those cool
understatements of danger that men in that country liked to make,
but Mark wasn't much of an audience. He lay still and paler than
ever—his habitual tan was barely noticeable now.

There was no reason for Willie to worry about
him really, except perhaps that he had made his living from his
ears and his instincts for years and something in the way Mark lay
suddenly looked wrong. He touched the shoulder hunched toward the
back of the sofa and Mark fell over on his back, his mouth open,
eyes half-slit.

"Mosby? Shit, boy, this is no time to get
puny on me. Come on, snap out of it," he said, but he knew that
wasn't going to work. He tried to remember what he knew about first
aid but it extended mostly to snake bites. He could help best by
getting the boy to a hospital. But when he lifted the receiver this
time, thinking to dial direct into Brownsville, the receiver
crackled back at him, giving him an ear full of static. Dialing
didn't improve the situation. He tried the house again and this
time, instead of the busy signal, he continued to get static.

He picked up his pistol and walked to the
screen door. The snake's dark shape lay coiled on the seat like a
cowpie, its head waving a little, as if looking for him. Willie
pulled back the hammer.

"Oh, sure, that's the way," the snake hissed.
"Kill me too, like you did that poor slob. That's all you're good
for."

"You're as dumb as you are ugly," Willie
said. "Mark's just a little busted up."

"Oh, yessss? Go check."

Slowly Willie backed into the room and shook
Mark. "Hey, buddy. Buddy, you okay?"

Mark's body fell off the couch and Willie saw
that his eyes were open around the bottoms, showing only the
whites. "Oh, shit," Willie said.

"Killer, killer, killer," the snake taunted.
"Drunken murderer. Don't you know whiskey is poison on top of a
head wound? He would have lived until you took him to the hospital
if you hadn't poisoned him with that so-called snake-bite medicine.
Killer, killer, killer."

"Well lookee who's talking," Willie yelled
back. "I mean, talk about the pot calling the kettle black, goddamn
rattlesnake calling me a killer. Jesus Christ, snake, I didn't kill
anybody and your kind ain't good for nothin' but. Mark'll be okay.
I just got to get him help. That's what I'm trying to do right now,
except you're in the way waitin' to bite me."

"Oh, sure, blame it on me if you want to. But
you're rid of your rival now, aren't you, MacKai?"

"You mean Mark? He's my friend—or was. And I
didn't kill him. He just—he just—uh—died."

"You might as well have put that bullet in
his head, smart ass. Why didn't you drive him straight up to the
house? Were you afraid your boss would see how pie-eyed you were?
Were you more worried about your job than your friend's life?"

"I just figured all that bumpin' around was
no good for him. Bring him back here, let him lie down, have a
drink . . ."

"Oh, yesss, a drink's the answer to
everything, wouldn't you say?" The snake's head rose into a
question mark at the last question.

Willie blinked twice and raised the gun. "I'd
say I'm a lot drunker than I thought I was to stand here takin'
this horseshit from a goddamn snake. So long, slick." He shot it
dead and it died in an appropriate bath of snake blood and shredded
upholstery.

Willie opened the bullet-punctured screen
door and was about to lift the reptile from the seat with the
barrel of his gun when another flash of fang and scaled body dove
from the flat roof above the door. Once again, he put the door
between him and it with more speed than either of them believed
possible. The snake's fangs tore at the screen.

Withdrawing its fangs from the mesh long
enough to rare back to strike again, the second snake hissed, "As
my mate was saying before she was so rudely interrupted . . ."

Willie blew that one away too, and tried the
phone in the house once more. This time it was dead.

He slammed it down and carefully sidled
toward the Jeep, opening the door to scrape the dead snake off the
seat with his gun barrel. The serpent landed in the road with a
puff of dust.

Willie slid onto the bloody Jeep seat, then
decided he shouldn't leave the door standing wide open. Mark wasn't
going anywhere, of course, but he didn't want any more snakes
getting into the house. As he closed the door, however, the
vibration set the banjo strings to humming and it sounded like the
seven notes from the chorus of an old song about the War Between
the States and a sweetheart who didn't want to be left behind.
"Won't you let me go with you," the banjo seemed to say and Willie
took it into his head that he just couldn't leave Hawthorne's banjo
lying there, even though his own guitars were both in plain
sight.

The strings thrummed the same seven notes
again as Willie grabbed the instrument and slammed through the door
again and out to the Jeep.

He turned the key over and the engine
started. The main house was about thirty miles down the road. His
house was by way of being a fancied-up line shack.

Halfway down the road the Jeep died, the gas
gauge needle sunk deep into the red E.

It occurred to Willie that he was not having
a very good night. It occurred to him that everything that was
happening sure made for a powerful string of unpleasant
coincidences. It also occurred to him, however, that just such
strings of coincidences tended to stack up against him when he was
particularly loaded. Not that he felt particularly loaded at the
moment. No, it was more like it was the rest of the world that was
drunk and he couldn't make heads or tails of it without another
drink.

Banjo in one hand, pistol in the other, he
climbed out of the Jeep and started walking in the direction of the
big house.

As if it had been waiting for him, a horse
trotted up. He recognized it at once. He had personally named it
the Strawberry Roan, although it was actually dun-colored, because
of its disposition, which matched that of the horse in the Curley
Fletcher poem, made into song just after the turn of the century.
The line "You could see with one eye he's a regular outlaw" fitted
the dun better than any saddle ever was likely to.

In keeping with the rest of the drunk world
though, the horse seemed inebriated too. Uncharacteristically, it
trotted meekly up to Willie and nuzzled him, all but wagging its
tail and inviting him to hop aboard.

"No thanks," Willie said. "My mama learned me
never to accept rides from no strangers; and, horse, you are actin'
stranger than all get out."

The horse knelt in the road.

Willie was suddenly weary in every fiber of
himself and even the banjo and the gun felt like mighty burdens.
Seeing the horse just kneeling like that, asking to be ridden,
well—Willie liked to think of himself as a man who was never one to
say no to temptation. He climbed aboard, the horse's sweat and that
of his own legs mingling. Slinging the banjo around onto his back
with the strap across his bare chest and sticking the gun barrel
into the waistband of his cutoffs, he grabbed a hank of mane and
tried to turn the horse with his knees. He wanted to ride toward
the big house, of course, but the dun-colored Strawberry Roan had
other ideas.

No sooner was Willie safely aboard than the
horse broke into a gallop. Bucking Willie had expected, and
recalcitrance, but this was like riding in the backseat of a car
going 120 miles an hour and having no way to get to the controls.
He just hung on for dear life and tried to enjoy the ride. It was a
little hard. He found he was not prepared for all eventualities.
True, he had the banjo and the gun, but he had forgotten to bring
his cigarettes.

* * *

"I don’t think this is a very nice story. I
don't think it is suitable for children," the boy's sister said.
"It is not a moral story."

"Sure it is, honey," the woman said. "I just
haven’t gotten to that part yet. It's about as moral as any story
you're ever going to hear."

"Didn't the cowboy know cigarettes and liquor
were bad for his health?" the boy asked worriedly.

His friend Jonah slapped him on the arm.
"God, Scott, how dumb can you be! Haven't you ever heard of
self-destructive tendencies? Willie knew he was a damn fossi—there
aren’t any cowboys anymore. So he didn’t care if he died of lung
cancer or exploded his liver or shot his own peepee off carrying
that gun in his pants like that."

But when they looked up from their argument,
the woman and the baby she had been minding were gone.

* * *

A week or so later, at a shelter for the
homeless, the bag lady who had been haunting the Seattle streets
got to the point in her story where the cowboy was carried away on
the dun called Strawberry Roan.

The woman who supervised the shelter at
night, a society matron with crisp silver waves and a round Nordic
face, so unlined that it would have seemed lifted or redolent of
Retin-A had it not been so animated, spoke up. "Excuse me, Gussie,
did you say something about the Strawberry Roan? My second husband
and I used to sing a song called that, written by a friend of
ours." She sang a bar or two of a melodic, pastoral-sounding love
song in a clear voice and then said, "But I've forgotten the rest
I'm afraid. And I don't have the tune quite right."

"You sure don't, lady," said one of the
winos, a man who just called himself Pete. "It don't go nothin'
like that and it ain't no love song. It goes like this—" and he
whistled a simple, repetitive tune through a few times over until
the curly-headed bag lady patted him on the arm.

"That's real good, Pete. Where'd you learn
that?"

"Offa old Tex Ritter movies when I was in the
VA hospital, " he said. "But it ain't no love song. It's about a
horse."

"I'd heard there was one about a horse," said
the society lady, whose badge said Mrs. Kathie Jorgensen, "but I
never knew how it went."

"I can recite it but I can't sing it," Gussie
said.

"I might be able to," Kathie Jorgensen said.
"If Pete could whistle the tune again. Then I'll get a pencil and
write it down as you say it."

Gussie looked uncomfortable. "Maybe
afterward, kiddo."

"After what?"

"Gussie's telling us a story, Kathie," a man
with graying hair, a blunted face, and thick tongue and narrowed
child's eyes, said. This was Tony, an aging man with Down's
syndrome. He'd outlived his parents and had been living on the
streets for the last five years. His childlike manner was sometimes
sly and sometimes mean but now it was fraught with anticipation,
eager to be bamboozled and convinced that there was something more
wonderful in the world than what he saw around him. "Go on, Gussie.
Go on."

* * *

Well, it didn't take any time at all for
Willie MacKai to get real good and sick of that ride. Bareback with
bare legs is all right for kids, but Willie hadn't been a kid for
thirty years. The dun galloped back down the road, past the Jeep,
past the cabin where poor Mark Mosby and the two dead rattlesnakes
lay, on and on till it passed the smoldering wreck of Mark's van
and raced into a bloodshot sunrise all clouded and be-gloomed with
what Willie learned very soon was a hell of a hailstorm that
pounded him and that dun with bitter-cold missiles and lashed them
with wind and wet but still the dun galloped on and on, past the
point where any sensible horse would have dropped dead.

Three times Willie decided he was already
dead and gone to hell and this was it, riding through those
tomb-cold hailstones on the back of a crazy horse, feeling saddle
sores pop out on him like zits on a teenager and seep like acid out
to encompass other parts of him in close proximity to the horse.
Three times he decided that if he was dead there was no reason not
to just jump off and he tried, but his sweat and blood and the
horse's foamy sweat and blood stuck his legs to the horse's sides
like he was one of those centaur things the old Greeks used to talk
about. The mane snarled around his fingers, trapping them. All in
all he decided it was less trouble just to stay put and see what
happened.

Willie lost consciousness before the dun's
hooves hit the edge of the ranch property. While he was
unconscious, Willie didn't feel his sores and bruises, didn't feel
the hail tearing at him, didn't feel when it stopped. All he felt
was the rocking of old S.R.'s back, steady as a hobby horse.

Through the rain, wind, and hail, he dreamed
he heard the jangle of the banjo strings and it seemed to him as if
they were playing "Stewball," the song about the racehorse.

When the rocking stopped, Willie was still on
the topside of the damn fool animal, though he was bleeding like a
stuck pig from his sores and smelled like horse. He was also dry as
a bone because he'd ridden the dun plumb out of the storm straight
through a day so hot it had sunburnt the top of his head where the
hair wasn't as thick as it used to be and on into night again. But
the minute he opened his eyes, despite his many sores, bruises, and
cuts, Willie felt sorry for all the terrible things he'd been
thinking about S.R. and all the awful names he'd screamed at that
horse under his breath.

For right there before his very eyes was
Lulubelle Baker's Petroleum Puncher's Paradise Bar and Grill. The
sign was neon and went halfway around the building and the rest was
lit up with Christmas lights and beer signs. This time when Willie
tried to get off he just slid right off. He patted the old dun
Strawberry Roan on the neck. "You're a fine beast, S.R.," he said.
"A horse after my own heart. Wait a minute and I'll bring you a
beer."

The pat was too much for the horse, who had
done more than any mortal, non-possessed horse could have done in
four days. He fell over sideways with a thump, between a bright
blue pickup with a window full of bumper stickers and an antique
yellow Volkswagen bug.