Picking the Ballad's Bones (3 page)

Anna Mae watched the land
fall away behind them and fretted. "I was hoping we could split up
again
into
teams
and rent cars to investigate songs in the various areas of England,
Ireland, Scotland, and Wales," Anna Mae said. "But I guess that's
out of the question. They'd want ID to rent cars."

"I'm sick of drivin' anyway, after
that mess out on the highway we got into on the way up to
Washington State," Brose said. "Feels good to have somebody else do
the drivin'." He glanced nervously over toward the banjo that
leaned up against the seat beside Willie, who was having his chest
hairs pulled by the redheaded stewardess. Brose was sure glad the
banjo wasn't playing train wreck songs. Though sometimes the tunes
or the lines it played were nothin' more than smart-alecky remarks
about what was going on, sometimes the banjo warned them of
danger—usually after they were already in it. Only once had it done
something more and that was when it helped Willie MacKai and
Julianne Martin write a song—kind of a riddle song.

"I hope to hell you all were right and
that that song meant we was supposed to come all the way over here
just to get ourselves in bad with the law."

"We have to reclaim the
music, Brose, you know that," Anna Mae told him. "Don't pretend
you
don't.
Without it we're helpless against whoever's behind this. You
know the songs helped save Willie and the others—"

Willie yawned, too sleepy
and too weary from the constant tension to be able to concentrate
while circumstances seemed less than life-and-death urgent.
Julianne Martin, trying to stay alert enough to guess what the
others were saying that she could no longer hear, glanced over at
him and quickly glanced away as Torchy Burns twined her legs around
his knee and rubbed his shoulders
long and
hard with her hands, careful to make sure and draw herself up
against him at every opportunity, her wild red hair screening them
both. Julianne shrugged and looked out the window instead. She
wasn't embarrassed particularly—years on the road with her late
husband George, crashing and traveling with other musicians, would
have cured her of prudishness, had she ever been inclined that way,
which she hadn't been. But she did feel a little disappointed in
Willie, that he seemed to be—well—too ready to fall into rather
obvious distraction. Not that Torchy wasn't probably a perfectly
nice person—although Juli thought there was something a little sly
about her. It was just that although Juli had known of Willie for
years and had run across him several times, only since they had
been traveling together had she really begun to realize that there
was something very special about him and she thought maybe he
didn't realize it himself. She had hoped the business with the
banjo and the music might help him to realize his potential. Her
spiritual counselor, Lucien Santos, was very big on potential and
had made Juli see that everybody had been given a lot of it and
most people were just too foolish to spend the money to go to a
wise counselor like Lucien to learn how to develop it. Juli thought
Willie would probably have to try to develop his on his own—not
with Lucien certainly. She didn't think Willie and Lucien would get
along at all although she didn't go quite so far in her sizing up
of the two of them to admit that the reason they wouldn't get along
is they would each see through the other one's brand of
horse-manure charm. On the other hand, whatever Torchy Burns was
going to help Willie develop, Juli was pretty sure it wasn't his
potential.

But then, maybe she was
just jealous. Not that she had designs on Willie but seeing other
people snuggling made her miss George, wish for him back to rub her
shoulders or to be able to play the spoons along his back, which
had made them both laugh and had usually led to other activities.
She sent out a mental call for George's spirit, but got no answer.
He probably couldn't hear her all the way over here in England,
although with Lucien's guidance
she had
been able to have a number of illuminating conversations with
George since he'd passed to the other side. George was the one who
had told her that music was not to be her way. That she should
study with Lucien to fully develop her psychic gifts instead. But
since she had never felt inclined to blindly follow George's advice
while he was alive (nor would he have expected her to), she
certainly didn't see why she ought to now that he was dead, so she
disregarded what George, Lucien, and the whole universe (as Lucien
claimed) were telling her and had insisted on going to one last
folk festival to try to gain everybody
else's
approval by performing again.
She wished she could be strong and sure of herself and not
be
such an approval
junkie—just charge right in there and do whatever she thought was
best. Well, she did, actually, except that she never was
really
sure
that
it was best until it was over with. It seemed like if she took a
poll first, even if nobody agreed with her, it was easier to decide
what she ought to do.

The folk festival was a
good example. If she hadn't gone, she would never have come into
contact with the spirit of Sam Hawthorne inhabiting the magic banjo
Lazarus, nor would she have known about the plot to wipe out folk
music. That part of it was positive, surely, that and meeting
Willie, Gussie, Anna Mae, and the others. She always tried to think
of the positive first. Lucien had taught her that. And although she
couldn't ever really forget it, when she brought the down side to
the front of her mind, her eyes filled and she grew quivery and
faint with the fear that she wouldn't hear again, would never be
able to make physical music. So she didn't dwell too long on the
fact that if she hadn't gone to the festival, she would not have
been standing in front of the microphone when lightning struck it,
deafening her. The deafness was probably only temporary, she told
herself as the panic threatened to choke her and she fought her way
back down to calmness and reasonableness by trying to concentrate
on her mantra. It couldn't be, couldn't be, couldn't be,
was not
permanent.

This was, like, her destiny, coming on
this trip and somehow her being here would help reverse the evil
that had fallen upon all of them. Surely her deafness wasn't
retribution for continuing to yearn for music when all of the
portents told her it no longer had a place in her life. Well, not
all the portents.

Lazarus, Hawthorne's banjo, had spoken
to her not just as a psychic but as a psychic musician whose
deafness the banjo's magic had simply ignored when it gave her and
Willie MacKai the song that would surely save them all. The song
that would lift the evil from them, from the music and musicians
all over the States. So surely, surely, please, God, please,
goddess, please, collective unconscious and all the powers that be,
it must be the evil that had made her deaf and if she helped
reverse it—she stopped thinking then because Lucien had told her
she had a regrettable tendency to believe in fairy-tale endings and
she realized that her hope for her hearing involved one. So she
turned her attention to Willie again.

Darn him. He was the
keeper of the banjo and if they were going to beat their
enemy—whatever it was—he was going to have to be strong and true
and a real spiritual warrior, as Lucien would have said, and that
was
not
going to
happen while he was carrying on with redheaded bimbos.

"Can't we just take the train
someplace? Ireland maybe?" Willie asked nobody in particular as he
languidly wiped a strand of Torchy's hair away from his face. "Lots
of songs in Ireland."

"There'd be too many ID checks along
the way," Anna Mae said, frowning. “Not to mention the Irish
Sea.”

"Scotland then," Gussie
suggested. "I've always wanted to see Scotland, ever since I
read
Rob Roy
when
I was a little girl."

Faron, who had been
quietly conferring with his wife, said, "That's a great idea. The
Child Ballads were from Scotland as much as England and we ought to
be able to find a copy of
Minstrelsy of
the Scottish Border
somewhere in Sir
Walter Scott country, I'd think. The library at Edinburgh
University is supposed to be great too."

"Oh, and they've some lovely pubs in
Scotland," Torchy Burns purred, cuddling up even closer, though it
hardly seemed possible, to Willie. "And these rail compartments are
very nice, aren't they? Quite a pleasant trip this could be." In
Willie's ear she whispered, "How about it, luv? There's a vacant
compartment next car over. I peeked when I went to the loo. Who'd
be the wiser?"

Julianne didn't need her
hearing to figure out what
that
little exchange was all about. Willie was cozying
up to the woman, buying into it.

Anna Mae Gunn didn't care much for the
way the flight attendant was behaving either. She seemed entirely
too nonchalant about their whole predicament. Why hadn't she tried
to stop the terrorist? Wasn't she worried about losing her job?
Anna Mae couldn't quite believe the woman was so impervious to
everything but Willie's renowned fatal charm that she forgot
everything. Little Torchy didn't seem like the kind of woman to let
anything about anybody else make her oblivious to her own
welfare.

Of course, what none of
them knew about Torchy was that she had another career quite a bit
more exotic than the one she had as a flight attendant, and it was
in danger too.

As Willie MacKai would
have told you in a New York minute, it wasn't that he was anybody's
fool, in particular. And he certainly did not make a habit of
making a fool of himself over women. Somewhat to his surprise, it
had almost always been the other way around. He wasn't exactly
handsome—in fact, if you looked at him carefully, you'd see that he
most exactly was
not
handsome. Kinda ordinary-looking with a big nose and crooked
teeth and a head of hair that in certain spots was, well, just a
head. But he was generally lean and even when he wasn't he gave the
impression of a particularly appealing coyote who had just
benefited from a handout and would revert to rib-ridged skinniness
in a couple of days. He had the same kind of animal magnetism as
that famous trickster of Indian tales too, and could be wily in the
woods or when he noticed enough of what was going on around
him to watch his tail. Mostly, though, he got so
purely wound up inside himself he just didn't notice, and if he
didn't have any special idea of what to do, he was content to drift
along with whoever did have. And Torchy Burns was, more than
anybody he'd ever been with, a critter with an agenda.

In the sleeping car where she was all
snuggled up with Willie, Torchy pulled out a flask, took a swig,
and grinned to herself. She had plans that involved Willie MacKai,
oh, yes, she did. And his little banjo too. But she wanted to have
some fun first. At times, the other devils could be as dull as
saints and they didn't understand that a being could get bored
unless she varied her routine a little. One big smashing evil after
another wasn't as interesting as stringing people along, letting
them think they were going to make it, then hitting them with
something to wipe the self-congratulations right out of them and
scare them too. She would—

Her thought was sliced in
half by the rude summoning of the Chairdevil, who jerked her spirit
right out of the flight attendant's body and back to the boardroom.
It took her half of one of Willie's heartbeats to reassemble
herself in front of the Devil's Board.

And Willie, who was so tired he
couldn't do much more than murmur sweet nothings in his sleep,
didn't see his playmate's hand stop with the flask halfway to her
mouth, drop limply to her side instead, and spill the perfectly
good contents of the flask all over the floor of the compartment.
The woman's whole body sagged to stillness, the eyes wide open and
staring as a baby doll's, as the ornery spirit who was the
animating force of that body was yanked back to headquarters to be
called on the carpet by her boss.

"Just what do you think you're doing
now, DD?" the Chairdevil demanded in front of the whole board of
devils meeting. They were all sitting around the big long table
looking as sanctimonious as if they worked for the Opposition. The
devil in the shape of the redheaded woman didn't have a whole lot
of use for her colleagues and the feeling was mutual.

So the Debauchery Devil, since that
was who the redheaded devil was, answered the Chairdevil in the
voice of her Texas persona, Lulubelle Baker, talking right back to
him just as saucy as good barbecue, "Why, boss, I was just fixin'
to pass on a little somethin' to my buddy Willie
MacKai."

"Isn't that closing the barn door
after the horses got out?" the Chairdevil asked. "Wasn't that
terrorist minion supposed to have blown up the plane in midair?
What did you do about that, DD? You blew it, didn't
you?"

She manifested herself a big wad of
Beelzebubblegum and blew a huge, sticky bubble of it so fat it
touched his nose before she popped it with a sassy grin and said,
"Now, boss, you know I did no such thing. All I blew was this
bubble and that is what's rilin' you, now isn't it? After all, I
didn't pick the terrorist minion. Can I help it if he's a sweet,
old-fashioned IRA type who gets all mushy over rebel songs instead
of heavy metal?"