Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (22 page)

"Can't do that, mister," the driver said.
She was a woman of about thirty with what Willie always thought of
as country-and-western hair—peroxide blond teased high into lots of
little curls, and so hard you could crack eggs on it. "That thing
belongs down below with the rest of the luggage."

Willie gave her his most winning grin,
having to dodge around other boarding passengers to meet her eye.
"Can't do that, darlin'. This thing's my livelihood."

"It gets off or you do, mister. Company
rules," she said. Her eyes, under black-penciled brows, were not
only hard enough to crack eggs, they could have splintered
diamonds.

"How about if I was to buy it a seat?" he
asked.

"Sorry. We got human bein's as needs all the
seats."

Willie looked around. There were many seats
containing no people, and most of the rows of seats had only one or
two occupants. He picked up the guitar and headed back toward the
driver. "Okay, then. Guess I've always wanted to see more of
Oklahoma City anyway."

* * *

"Hmph," said Barbara Harrington-Smith. "I
expected you to tell us next that just because the bus driver was a
woman, this Willie person charmed his way out of the situation and
made her break her company's rules."

Ute looked like he'd been caught with his
hand in the cookie jar. "He didn't mean to, exactly, ma'am. It was
the fairy dust, see. Once he got her in range, you might say, she
was pretty much a goner as far as bein' charmed goes. Of course,
bein' charmed only went so far, as I'm sure you 'll be glad to
know. She was, after all, a company woman and as the driver and
baggage handler, she had very definite notions about guitars and
such. For instance, that since they weren't allowed on board and
almost always ended up causing trouble—like when some irate
musician who had been foolish enough to bring his or her instrument
on board found it smashed by the end of the journey—she decided
that such instruments and such people were automatically trashy
troublemakers beneath her contempt. Only she had trouble
reconciling that image with fairy-dust-enhanced Willie as he stood
there, guitar case in hand, eyes glowing with indignation, looking
to her every inch the sort of man she had always hoped to meet in
bars before she stopped going to such places because nobody who
valued their job did that sort of thing anymore. She was havin'
herself a major conflict, you see, between what she thought of
guitar pickers and their instruments in general—which is that they
at the very least did not belong in public—and what she found
herself thinkin' about Willie MacKai in particular—which was he had
somehow blundered into evil companions, namely the guitar, and
maybe a good woman could lead him to better ways. And she couldn't
do that if she let him leave the bus. So she looked up at him,
batting her eyes not so much because she was flirting because, like
most people, she'd just about forgotten how to do that—"

"Well, of course. That's a very frivolous
and basically deceptive activity which has nothing to do with real
interest in a meaningful relationship," Shayla said, as if reciting
a lesson, though she was in fact reciting something she'd read in a
magazine. (The article, in fact, had been penned by a protégé of
the Chairdevil, a rather sour man who didn 't care for sex at all
or for women in particular and felt all of a lot of other people's
power was sexual and they ought to be prevented from using it on
defenseless people such as himself, who were nevertheless clever
enough to write manipulative articles.)

"Yeah, well, she knew that, so she wasn’t
really flirtin', she was just blinkin' kinda rapidly on accounta,
you know, biochemical and hormonal reactions."

"Oh, well, that's different," said Mary
Armstrong, who was carefully focusing on the fire so nobody would
notice that she blinked quite a bit from biochemical and hormonal
reactions when she looked at Ute, who always seemed to have
camp-fire smoke in his eyes when he looked at her too.

* * *

Willie was surprised, when he got up close
to the guitar-hating bus driver, to find her batting her eyes at
him and smiling in what tried to be a cold, official kind of way
but actually betrayed the hard hair and the hard eyebrows and
showed that she was, after all, only about thirty.

"No need for that, sir. I don't know
how you can claim that no-count thing is your livelihood since
nobody makes a
livin'
with
stuff like that 'cept maybe Duck Soul, but you
did
buy your ticket, and I can see the bus ain't
all that full. I think if you take this here scat up by me, you can
lay it out on that seat behind me and it won't bother
nobody."

Even then Willie thought maybe getting
off the bus was still the best idea, but he figured he was going to
have some kind of trouble wherever he went, and since this
particular trouble seemed to have unexpectedly blown over, thanks
to his personal charm and way with the ladies and
maybe
, he grudgingly admitted, the
pinch of fairy dust he'd sprinkled on back in Tulsa, he decided to
proceed. One thing about the bus driver. There was
no way
he could identify her with
any of the mistreated sweet young things he'd occupied in ballads.
Oh, sure, maybe she'd had a rough childhood or a bad marriage or
something, but so had he. No, he felt the proper attitude around
such a woman was to be cautious.

Only problem was, it's hard to be cautious
while you're asleep. With the guitar in plain sight, the shushing
sound of the bus's tires on the highway, the rumble of its engine,
the yellow lights of the city flashing on the drops of water beaded
on the windows, and a general lack of sleeping in real beds, which
had developed in him a tendency to nap whenever he was sitting
still, Willie dozed off. He'd change buses in Wichita Falls, he
thought as he drifted into sleep. Maybe head for Dallas or Fort
Worth, where he had friends he might talk out of a vehicle. He
didn't want to stick around where he knew people, mind you, just
get himself some wheels and be on his own for a while. He always
performed best alone. Maybe he should take the music he had learned
to some nice select girls' school with lots of intelligent young
women who could learn a lot from the ballads he knew. He fell
asleep dreaming about it.

* * *

Anna Mae walked past the block-long
shuttered fireworks stand, past the boarded-up windows of the
building painted with faded thunderbirds. The broken neon lights
had once spelled out the words "Chief Cwana's Casino." At the far
end of the compound, a tall wooden fence with broken slats guarded
what looked like a patch of weeds. The only thing open was a dimly
lit convenience store advertising cut-rate cigarettes. Its screen
door banged back and forth in the wind. She wondered how the people
inside could stand it. She fought the wind for control of the
screen door and opened the unpainted wooden inner door. The wind
avenged itself by whipping both doors from her hand and slamming
the inner door open and the screen door back against the building.
She stepped inside.

* * *

Thomas George was ringing out the register
when the bedraggled woman came in. The register wasn't hard to ring
out. No sales all day. Same as usual. Sometimes tourists came in
the summer to see what was left of the museum, but now with the new
supermarket just off the reservation, the only customers he had
were usually lost. Nobody came for the canned stuff, the tractor
caps, the painted toy drums with the Naugahyde heads, and the
bumper stickers that said "Oklahoma is Indian Country!" He'd marked
his seed beads and German silver down fifty percent, but nobody
came to buy it. No place to wear that stuff anymore without looking
like a white tourist. They were the only people who had been able
to afford anything since the casino closed and the fireworks stand
was now limited to operation the week before the fourth.

He already had quite a bit of beadwork and
silver jewelry people had given him in trade for counseling. He
didn't take it from somebody who was still drinking, if he thought
the piece might belong to the wife or the family. Old Mrs. Spotted
Horse had given him a matching belt and hatband that back east art
museums would at one time have paid quite a bit of money for. That
was when he tried to get her pension with the phone company
straightened out. He'd saved a few more pieces for his kids, but he
wanted to wait until they were grown to give the jewelry to them so
his ex-wife didn't just throw it away. Old ladies had gone blind
doing that stuff. Occasionally some artsy tourist would buy some,
but mostly the beads hung from their hooks till the thread rotted
and the strands fell apart.

The woman strode over to him, her jeans
squishing as she walked, dripping water, but there was a way about
her. She was definitely someone with an agenda.

"I want to talk to the elders," she said, as
if he were the bartender and she was ordering a beer.

He looked to the right, the left, and made
an exaggerated show of looking behind him and under the counter, in
the empty till, then shrugged, smiling, and said, "Sorry. There
don't seem to be any around." If she wasn't so wet, she might be
kind of a pretty woman.

Didn't have a sense of humor, though, or if
she did, it had washed away in the rain. "Shit," she said, then
sighed and asked, "Does anybody who knows how to get a hold of any
of them come around here, say, tomorrow?"

He looked her over more carefully. She had a
citified briskness about her and could have been a dressed-down
corporate lawyer or one of the firewater fuzz, but he didn't think
so. Her haircut wasn't very good, and her nails were cut funny—long
on the right hand, to the quick on the left. He'd never seen a
corporate woman with those flaws, however old their jeans might be,
and if she were a fed or the fuzz, would she have come right out
and asked like that?

"Maybe," he said after a moment. "That would
depend on who's asking. You an anthropology student, maybe? We
haven't had any of them around here in a long time."

"No," she said. "My name's Anna Mae Gunn,
but maybe one of the older ones will remember me as Mabel, the name
given me by my real mother—Betty Charley? I was adopted when I was
about three."

"You lookin' for your roots or somethin'
then?" he asked, giving nothing away.

"Not the way you're thinking," she said, not
telling him anything either. "But I need to talk with some of the
elders. It's important."

"Huh. Heap big medicine, huh? Maybe you
could tell me, then. I'm the tribal shrink." He stuck out his hand.
"Thomas George."

She shook it and suddenly flashed him a
white smile that temporarily lit the gloom of the store. "I've been
out of the country for a while. I didn't know things had gotten so
crazy back here that whole tribes needed shrinks."

"Well, I was the twelve-step leader until
recently. Then the government decided to crack down on substance
abuse—especially on the reservations. It's a federal offense to be
drunk or stoned here now, though, of course, it's not such a big
deal elsewhere. So nobody much wants to see me anymore, since I'm
supposed to report them to the feds. I see a few cases of domestic
violence, rape, incest, that kind of stuff. Mostly now, since old
man Parker died, I just—" He spread his hands encompassing the shop
to show her he was lord of all he surveyed.

"You think I'm an undercover cop, don't
you?" she asked. When he didn't say anything, she said, "That's
what I'd think if I were you. But I'm not. I'm one of the
People—Chickasaw, and I'm a musician. I want to talk to the elders
about songs they may remember."

"You make it sound like an emergency," he
said, closing the cash drawer. He wanted time to check this out
before he committed himself, to find out about Betty Charley and if
she had a daughter Mabel and if the only two old folks who weren't
dead or addled with Alzheimer's would be willing to talk to this
daughter. Besides, he had other obligations. "Look, I got to get
back to my sister's place—I'm lookin' after her kids evenings while
she works at the hospital. But I'll send up a smoke signal and let
you know what I find out if you come back tomorrow, okay?"

"Yeah, sure," she said. He ushered her to
the front door and locked it from the inside behind her, going out
the back to his truck. He didn't realize until he was halfway to
his sister's that he had never told her where to find a motel, and
he hadn't seen another car in the parking lot when he left her
standing there.

CHAPTER 16

Lucien, being a master psychic, was not, of
course, surprised to see Julianne. "What kept you so long?" he
asked, ushering her inside and allowing his hand to linger on her
shoulder longer than was strictly necessary. "I was expecting you
two hours ago."

"Oh, we made a detour to—" She started to
tell him about Willie. Seven years ago she trusted this man with
her secrets from beyond the grave, but a lot had gone down in seven
years, and now she looked at him with fresh eyes.

His
eyes were
still as piercing as ever, but she noticed dark circles under them.
"Lucien, you look tired," she said. "Have you been eating red
meat?" It was her kindest guess. Actually, the crystals that
studded his house, many of them still yellow-tinged from the
ground, fairly throbbed with disapproval.
They
had been trying to clear the vibes, they
seemed to insist, but with
some
people around, even the most awesome stone was overtaxed.
Unfortunately, she couldn't quite tell whether their reaction was
to her or to Lucien.