Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (16 page)

Across the street the orange cat sat on the
fence and switched her tail until the man was out of sight, then
calmly began licking her paw in a satisfied fashion.

CHAPTER 11

Terry Pruitt and Dan were on the way back to
the Curtises' house when they saw Willie stalking furiously toward
them.

As Terry turned up the walk to the house,
Dan turned off and fell into stride with Willie, who acted as if he
weren't there. Dan didn't say anything, just walked along beside
him. Since he was taller and his stride was longer, he was able to
walk with the appearance of someone calmly strolling while Willie
stomped in giant steps. After a while Willie said, "This ain’t
gonna work, you know."

"What?"

"All our noble efforts to return folk music
to the land of the chronically disinterested. It just ain't gonna
work, buddy. They'd rather watch TV. Hell, most of the time, I'd
rather watch TV. It's okay over there where there are all those
people with all that history to talk about how powerful it all is,
but here nobody gives a good fart."

"I thought that's why we were here. To
convince them that they should. I guess a person gets used to
having a magic banjo around, huh?"

"You get used to anything, buddy."

"So far I haven't. You can't really blame
people for not caring about the music when those whatchacallems
wiped everybody's memory, Willie."

"Well, sure, but I played for somebody
earlier today who remembered me—they asked me to. After all we've
been through and all the trouble and danger and pure hell it's
taken to get back here, they didn't even listen, just turned back
to the TV."

"Yeah, well, some audiences are hell. I
don't have to tell you that."

"Maybe not. But now it's like because I have
the banjo it's up to me to organize all this, and frankly,
buddy"—he turned a bewildered face to Dan—"I got all I can do to
organize myself most days."

Dan shrugged. "We're all good at different
things, Willie. I'm not much of an organizer or a businessperson
myself, but Terry's great at it. She's shy, though, and I love
talking to people, so usually I find all the neat things to do and
the people to play with, and she tries to make sure we show
up."

Willie said, "Seems like I've got two
speeds. Full tilt and flat on my back. More and more I feel like as
soon as I slow down, I'll slip up, and there'll be Lulubelle and
her gang to get me and the rest of you with me."

"They might, except that if you fall asleep
on the job, probably one of the rest of us will be awake then. And
there's this about traveling together, if we get caught by the
short hairs, at least we'll all have lots of company."

"I guess that's what's been getting to me.
So much company all the time and havin' to consult everybody else.
I play a lone hand usually."

Dan shrugged again. "Sometimes I do too. I
need to get away from everybody else to listen to my own inner
voices. But I don't always have anything important to say to
myself. So most of the time it's okay to be with people."

Willie sighed, and the storm wind that had
puffed him up died down. He hadn't known what to make of Dan
before. Hadn't especially thought about it much except to note that
Dan wasn't all that bad for one of those "sensitive" guys. As far
as figuring out what somebody else was about, Willie generally had
his hands full trying to figure out Willie. He mistrusted guys like
Dan generally, though.

Willie, on the shady side of middle age, had
been brought up in hard country and taught that a man was supposed
to be hard and tough and the more you hurt him the tougher he got.
That was one reason why when he hurt he wanted to get away from
people or get drunk. Because the truth was that he wasn't very hard
or tough at all. He hurt like hell all the way through and
sometimes not over anything that ought to be important.

Any one of those young girls he had shared a
body with during his ensorcelment in Scottish ballads had been
through harder things than he was going through now, though it
occurred to him that if he had been in his own flesh instead of
just in the minds of those girls, he would never have taken their
problems so seriously, would never have known how deeply they hurt,
would never have been able to offer the comfort and advice that, as
the disembodied spirit who was a caring part of themselves, he was
able to give.

He would have told them that they needed to
be hard and tough and maybe hugged them while they cried but
secretly thought less of them for doing it. Or helped them get
drunk. As long as you were drunk, it was okay to cry or say just
about anything.

He wondered a little about Torchy, and her
current role as the Debauchery Devil. She'd let it slip that being
a devil was her punishment for failing in her tithe to hell the
year Bird Janet saved Tam Lin from being the sacrifice himself.
Since the Queen of Faerie, who at the time was Torchy, had had
nothing with which to pay the yearly tribute, she'd had to go to
hell herself. What did a nice fairy queen like her do in a place
like that? She'd become the worst kind of whore, using her glamorie
not just to hide her magic realm from men or to help them see it,
but to tempt them to drugs and drink and all other manner of things
that would waste their lives in far less wondrous ways.

He wondered if her buddies assigned her that
role or if it had just sort of come to her, when she lost
everything and needed the anesthetic of some kind of chemical
fairyland to make it from second to second. Unlike him, the poor
bitch was immortal and didn't even have the possibility of drinking
herself to death.

But then there was Dan, who didn't drink and
wasn't hard and tough, at least not in the way Willie had learned
to be. Dan had more in common with those medieval ballad girls than
he did with Willie. Usually he was as happy to see you and as
friendly as a big old hound dog, but sometimes he did get quiet and
withdraw from the group. Then afterward, something that had always
irritated the hell out of Willie, he'd want to talk over whatever
had made him withdraw to begin with.

Maybe Dan wasn't withdrawing to hide his
feelings. Maybe he was withdrawing to keep from having to act like
an asshole when he got pissed off and negative. Which was to some
extent what Willie was doing now, though once he'd started talking
to Dan, he'd figured out that he wasn't pissed off at the rest of
the group so much as he was by the incident in the bar. It had
discouraged him, and he had basically been trying to pass the
discouragement around. He also realized he didn't actually need all
that much time alone. He was used to being by himself in crowds,
used to having crowds of people around him from back when he was on
the road. In fact, if there wasn't a bunch of people around him, he
did his best to go find some.

He didn't feel like he had to explain any of
that to Dan. He had the feeling that Dan knew all of it to begin
with or he wouldn't have started walking with him. Dan might seem
wet behind the ears, but in fact he had spent years working as a
photojournalist for big-city newspapers before discovering that the
music he had played with his Norwegian grandfather was his true
love.

Willie said, "I appreciate you tryin' to
help, buddy. I need to walk a while more by myself, though, if it's
all the same to you."

"No problem," Dan said, and turned back
toward the house.

* * *

When Willie, Terry, Dan, and Brose returned
later from their walks, they had to be careful where they stepped.
Instruments littered the living room.

Gussie beamed proudly and said, "Take your
pick, ladies and gentlemen. There's plenty for everybody."

"This is like Christmas!" Terry said.

Willie resisted the pull of a beautiful old
Martin guitar long enough to chide, "Gussie, I told you to hang
onto that money."

"Oh, Willie, what a lousy time for you
to suddenly become grown-up enough to worry about things like
that," she said. "If I lose it all, I do. Lettie and Mic will give
my cats a home, and I don't even care about my collections
anymore.
This
is my
collection. Now stop fussin' and spoilin' everything and play
something pretty, will you?"

CHAPTER 12

Early November in Oklahoma is unpredictable.
Usually it's still pretty warm, but sometimes it gets cold at
nights and the wind strips the trees of their big yellow and red
leaves, which fly at the windshields of cars and sail down gutters
on fresh gushes of heavy rain.

Inside the Curtis house the furnace rumbled
for the first time that season, filling the house with the pleasant
smell of warm dust. Everybody convened in the living room, sitting
in chairs and on the arms of chairs, except for Willie, of course,
who paced. They weren't many to accomplish the overwhelming task
before them but they formed quite a mob for such a small room.

Molly sat in the old rocker with the
stuffing poking out between long clawed places in the faded
flowered upholstery. "I still can't make sense of what you say
happened to you. But while you've been havin' all those adventures,
Barry and I haven't heard anything we would properly call music for
over five years. Play us something you learned, please. Anything.
It's been a long time."

Julianne sang a cappella while the others
were tuning the song of King Henry, whose courtesy to a monster won
him not only his life but a bride who was the making of his kingdom
and the love of his life. Brose, taking his cue from her, took up
the twelve-string guitar he had just tuned and sang a low-down
bluesy version Molly was sure she never before had heard of "The
Brown Girl," and segued into "Black Girl" or "In the Pines" and
back to the ending of "The Brown Girl." Not to be outdone, Willie
picked up Lazarus and stood in the center of the room, his eyes
closed, the banjo crying in a minor key, as he sang "The Dowie Dens
of Yarrow." And Anna Mac played a concertina and sang "Kempie
Owen," her voice droning away into a tense vibrato at the end.

Dan also played the concertina as he sang a
tune from the Shetland Isles, and Terry sang in the Northern Scots,
which was so close to the Scandinavian tongues.

Then Gussie brushed off her skirts and said,
"I believe I have one to sing too." Gussie generally couldn't carry
a tune in a bucket, but what she performed wasn't exactly a song.
It was a border-gathering song, the battle cry of a wronged woman
whose goods had been stolen and her friend murdered, "The Fray of
Suport," and it was that song that had led her and Sir Walter Scott
to the stronghold of his robber-baron ancestors and told her more
than all the history books about life on the Borders in Scotland.
As she sang and her voice faltered, Willie and Anna Mae, then
Terry, Faron, Brose, and Julianne joined her. Finally, even Ellie
and her parents added their voices to the long cry of "Fy lads! A'
a' a' a' a' / My gear’s a' ta'en."

The cry expressed very well what they all
felt at having their tapes, records, songbooks, and folklore books
stolen or destroyed, their memories looted of words and music by
unseen forces.

But about that time one of the forces
decided to allow itself to be seen.

"Okay, okay," said the redhead who was
suddenly and without prior notice or approval sitting with her
short-shorts-ed bottom on Barry Curtis's knee, swinging the
flip-flopped foot of a long bare leg back and forth impatiently. "I
get the picture. No, no, don't quit playing. You—tall, gray and
handsome," she said to Dan. "Keep sawing away on that thing, will
you? I need a little cover here."

"Torchy, what in the hell are you doin'
here?" Willie asked.

"I'm gettin' to that," she said, pulling an
extra-tars-and-nicotine Brimstone Light cigarette out from between
her bright-red-lipsticked lips with bright-red-nail-polished,
tobacco-yellowed fingers. She took two deep drags, exhaled the
fumes upward to encircle the light fixture in the ceiling, and
said, "Okay, so here's the deal. I want in."

"In what?" Gussie asked.

The Debauchery Devil waved her cigarette in
a negligent circle, setting fire to Barry's T-shirt before she put
him out with an absent sweep of her other hand.

"You know, in with you guys. I want to help
you."

"How touching," Anna Mae said, scratching a
sour chord on the fiddle she had picked up just before Torchy made
her appearance.

"Yeah, well. I been thinkin' about a career
change for some time, y'know? Low job satisfaction lately. I don't
get no respect. My—uh—co-workers in the Company work their wiles on
humans with all their subtle suggestions and magicks and stuff and
don't respect me because most of my spells need outside potions and
chemicals to work. I mean, even when I started showin' them how you
can use a person's own chemicals to hook 'em, on each other or
sports or somethin', they still treat me like the town drunk, the
community chest, you know. That little chitchat I had with Ma
Turner there when I gave her a lift to Vegas"—she nodded to
Gussie—"got me to feelin' down, and I remembered how sweet that old
Sir Wat-tikins' ghost was when he saw me back in Scotland and
didn't realize how things had changed for me. People I used to be
queen of are still around just north of here, where what you guys
do is still going strong—why them and not me? I want a little
respect too. I want to be a bloody queen again."

"You shoulda thought of that before you fell
in with evil companions, darlin'," Willie told her.

With a steely look in her eye, Molly patted
the floor beside her and crooked her finger at the redhead. "Until
your coronation, missy, if you want respect, I'd say you better
start actin' respectable and remove your butt from the knees of
other people's husbands."