Picking the Ballad's Bones (6 page)

* * *

The ghost of Sir Walter Scott was
dimly aware of all of these goings on, as if seeing a play from a
great distance, through a crowd of other conversations and street
scenes. He heard Julianne Martin's silent prayers, which she would
have called drawing on the collective unconscious, as she lay
huddled in the midst of a bunch of Gypsies. Across the ether he
also heard the wild beating of Mae Gunn's heart as she dodged and
ducked her way from the station and into the town, heard the coin
drop into the telephone with a little jingle as Faron Randolph
placed his call, and heard the phone ring on the other end, at
Terry Pruitt's house, on and on, ring after ring as she played her
electric guitar with the sound going into headphones. And he heard
the train pull out, pick up steam, and, as night-came on, squeal
and scream down the tracks.

* * *

The troubles of the living in
Carlisle, a ride of several days on horseback; came to the ghost no
more sharply than a daydream, for now, during the day, when his
house was filled with visitors, he was much less able to find
distant vibrations than he was at night when there was little
activity to mask such subtle emanations. The daylight diminished
him, as he supposed it was proper that ghosts be diminished by the
sun, and even on the gloomiest day he could scarcely see his hand
in front of his face for the light. The banjo songs tolled in his
ears like the knell of church bells, however, and as day carmined
to dusk and the lady of the moon flung her tow-colored tresses
across the carpet in his study, the events within the banjo's ken
became his own dreams, sometimes vague and filled with symbol and
portent, but other times as clear as if the people were staging a
play for his benefit.

* * *

The Shriners sprawled
around the hotel room long after the party was over and the
bartender had cleaned up. They were still listening to her story.
She was a good bartender and quite the little entertainer too.
Wally Haskell hadn't even had a chance to tell her the one about
the Fuller brush saleslady and the Avon man and he was still
keeping
quiet, listening to her. Probably
his vocal cords were para
lyzed from those
margaritas she'd been making.

"Screw the ghost," Harry
Latimer said. "What happened to the little blond gal with all the
foreigners? I
mean, the redhead set her
up, right? So those guys were
more than a
circus, I'll bet. Probably white slavers or drug
runners or something, huh?"

"Boy, I can't surprise you
with anything!" the bartender said admiringly.

* * *

As soon as the policeman backed out of
the car, Julianne sat up and jerked the scarf off of her head but
the man she had first met came to stand spraddle-legged, looming
over her.

"Thanks for hiding me," she said,
hoping that her voice sounded calm. "But I need to go now. My
friends will be worried." The man shook his head slowly and knelt
over her knees, reaching his hand forward to stroke her chin. He
said something and for the first time since the explosion had
stolen her hearing she was glad she couldn't hear what it
was.

Others in the room were less
fortunate, however, and the woman who had been cooking dragged the
two kids who clung to her skirts closer to him. Juli noticed the
kids bailed out pretty quickly, releasing the skirt to stand off to
one side. One of them who must have been at least six stuck his
thumb in his mouth and stared with large dark eyes. The little
girl, probably three or so, danced from one foot to the other with
agitation. The woman waved her free hand in the man's face and
gestured angrily at Juli, making a slit throat sign across her own
neck. The man reached up wearily and shoved the woman away with
such force that she staggered backward several feet with no
furniture to break her fall or to injure her.

Julianne scooted her feet
up under her, put her back against the wall, and took a careful
survey of who was between her and the door. The Gypsy woman struck,
cuffing her man on the ear, and he turned in his crouch and
backhanded her, following, still not completely upright, to strike
her again. The woman opened her mouth to an ugly snarl, her eyes
showing white all around the irises, and she must have called a
name, for a young girl
reached out and
plucked the baby away just before
the
man struck again, and the woman,
who first staggered
back, half fell
on him with her hands extended clawlike, her
mouth open in what seemed to Juli a silent scream.

Her deafness gave Julianne a
detachment from the scene that she was not unhappy to have, as if
she had been able to cut the volume on some sordid soap opera that
was being enacted in front of her. She had to remind herself that
she was the focus of this particular soap, the girl most likely to
end up tied to the railroad tracks. She decided she would rather
deal with the police. The train was still moving but in the cars
beyond were other, less crazed people. If only she hadn't listened
to that damned redhead. Juli knew that Torchy was trouble and now
it looked as if she'd fed Juli to white slavers. The guy who kept
invading her personal space looked as if he definitely had a fate
worse than death in mind for her.

As the Gypsy woman dragged
the man to the floor, Juli bounded across the legs of two
spectators and three sleeping children and grabbed for the door
handle. She shoved but the door stayed resolutely closed for a
moment. Then she saw the metal plate on the outer edge of the door
and the sign that said push. She pushed, lurched forward through
the door as someone else wedged in behind her, her fingers
frantically outstretched to push the metal panel on the door to the
next car. Hands clung to her waist
but
she twisted aside and flung
herself against the door, which gave, spilling her forward, into a
dark void full of wild and gamey odors.

CHAPTER 6

"You in there, Willie MacKai?" a
female voice somewhat less seductive than Torchy's and much
safer-sounding demanded. "You come out of there right
now."

"Yes, ma'am," Willie said very softly.
"Only please keep your voice down and come and get me out of this
cage without unduly disturbing these—" The flashlight beam fell on
moth-eaten furry golden backs and droopy-lipped furry faces.
"Lions," he finished, gulping. The lions lay like pussycats with
their chins on their massive paws, snoring. Underneath all the
animal noises, and Gussie's questions, the banjo continued
plinking, and as Willie scooped it up he remembered that the tune
it was still frailing at for all it was worth was "Wimoweh (The
Lion Sleeps Tonight)," probably the best-known African lullaby in
the whole United States.

Gussie had seen the lions too, and as
soon as she had Willie free of the cage, which locked from the
outside with a big old-fashioned key that must have turned itself
when the door slammed shut, she let Willie have it, asking him what
he meant by running off with redheads and messing around with mangy
old circus animals where he might get the banjo damaged or even get
hurt himself.

Willie agreed with everything she said
without paying any attention to any of it and concentrated on
walking. He was walking kind of funny because by then his pants
were a little messy.

He only started breathing again when
they left the stench of the circus car and the dark metal corridors
of the cars between and stepped into the soft light of the
passenger car.

The lions had produced
what you could call a sobering effect on Willie and belatedly he
realized that it was entirely possible that sweet little Torchy
might have deliberately led him into the lions' den. (The woman did
have a warped sense of humor. She always seemed to be laughing
about something. He'd thought she was just good-natured. You never
could tell.) She might also have been mixed up with the bomber at
the airport and might, therefore, have something to do with the
predicament Willie and his friends now found themselves in. He said
as much aloud to Gussie who told him with a patronizing little
schoolmarm smile that he was catching on okay, nothing got
by
him.

The banjo continued a
medley of "Whiskey in the Jar," "Lady of Carlisle," and "Wimoweh"
as the train screamed and screeched down the tracks, leaning into
the curves, its metal straining and the wheels rumbling, jerking
Gussie back and forth as she tried to sleep, or, rather, tried not
to. Willie was sleeping like a baby. He had hardly been able to
keep his eyes open long enough to sit down and Gussie supposed his
lassitude was the aftermath of being scared half to death. If only
they didn't have to keep still about being
on
this train, she would have told
the conductor a thing or two about letting wild animals on board
where they could scare the pee out of innocent bystanders. That was
the trouble with not being exactly innocent anymore. Not that they
were guilty of anything, really, but they'd been made to feel as if
they were since Anna Mae Gunn's ill-fated folk festival two months
before. Gussie rested her cheek on the rough straw of her Mexican
basket bag and stared out the window, watching the darkness roll
past. Without the others here to remind her, she began to doubt
what she'd been through. If only there'd been time to make plans
before they'd gotten separated.

The conductor's voice woke
her to watery sunlight wavering through the cracks between the
shades and the
windows. "Now arrivin'
Edinburgh," he said with a lot more r's than it normally took to
say such a thing. Willie still slept, his bare legs covered up by
the blanket the railroad loaned people. Sometime while she slept he
seemed to have gotten up and washed his jeans out—they were hung on
the coat hook by the window nearest him.

Lots of soot-stained chimneys and the
back ends of stone houses and factory buildings hemmed the tracks
as the train puffed its way into the station.

She shook Willie. "This is our stop,"
she told him. He looked about as bad as she'd ever seen him and
muttered that he felt worse. She had to help him put his jeans on
because he said it hurt his head to bend over. They were halfway
down the steps to the platform when she noticed he didn't have the
banjo and she had to rush back and get it.

So she could tell right
off he wasn't going to be much help the way he was. Probably be
more trouble when he got to feeling better too. Willie MacKai was a
good man but for all his easy drawl he was a jumpy sort of man and
not a bit easy to keep track of, according to former girlfriends
who had cried in their beer over him to Gussie in years past. Once
he was fully awake again, she figured herding cockroaches at a
garbage dump would be a cinch compared to trying to hang on to
Willie. So possibly she should be grateful that he was still
stupefied and take the bull by the horns and
do
something herself.

What she wanted to do was find the
others and make a plan, but since she had no idea how to do that,
the best thing to do would be to make a plan on her own and try to
get Willie MacKai to help her. He stood in the light drizzly rain,
looking around him blankly. Down at the end of the train, two cars
were being unloaded into trucks.

Gussie sighed and tucked the banjo
head into her basket bag so it wouldn't get wet. Lord only knew
what had become of the garment bag Willie had wrapped it in when he
came through customs. The banjo thrummed as she shifted it, its
strings muted by the roar of disgruntled animals from the cages
being unloaded down the track

This must be some rich
circus to have railroad cars
and
trucks to haul their equipment. The banjo twanged
a little tune now and it sank into Gussie's consciousness. She
could hear who?—Doc Watson?—singing that song "The Gypsy Davey."
That song was one widely sung in the United States but it
originally came from the British Isles—hard to tell which place,
which figured, since Gypsies by definition tended to get
around.

The sign on the side of the trucks
said Circus Rom, plain as the nose on your face. Rom meant Gypsy in
their own language, Gussie knew from her reading. As in Romany. And
the people dodging around in the half-light were mostly dark as
Indians, black-haired and very tan. But weren't the Gypsies
hereabouts supposed to look like other folks? She could clearly
remember from old Ewan MacColl songs and one sung by the Clancy
Brothers lines about tinkers, as they called the Gypsies here.
Tinkers, according to the liner notes, weren't dark, mostly, but
red-haired and blond and as purely mixed up as other folks. Most of
the ethnic-looking Gypsies, or an awful lot of them, had been
killed off by the Nazis in concentration camps along with the
Jewish people and everybody else Hitler wanted to get rid of. And
mostly, she'd always thought, the Gypsies didn't run big operations
like this one. But what the hell did she know about it? Her only
contact with Gypsies at home had been seeing the palm-reading signs
out in front of otherwise abandoned buildings in South Tacoma. She
never had run into any of them at all while living in West Texas.
Well, not that she knew of. If she had seen them, she probably took
them for Mexicans.