Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (5 page)

"Well, it looks calm enough now, and
there'll be federales sniffin' around to see what washed up pretty
soon. Anybody want to go wadin'?" And before anyone could answer,
he waded into the river, jeans, boots, and all—just in case there
were some snakes left—carrying the banjo high over his head the way
a soldier carries his gun when similarly fording. The banjo
accommodatingly played "Wade in the Water," and Willie, who was
trying awfully hard
not
to
think about the snakes from the night before, sang in breathy
snatches, "Wade in the water, children, / Wade in the water. /
God's gonna trouble the water."

Julianne plowed into the water behind him,
her long batik skirt kilted to the waist, her running shoes tied
together by their laces around her neck, and a knapsack slung
across her shoulders.

She took up the verse, "Look at those
children / Dressed in red—" and Willie and the others sang, "Wade
in the water."

"They must have been the children Lazarus
led," she continued, improvising on the biblical figure,
substituting the name of the banjo for Moses.

As Brose followed, he sang, "Look at those
children dressed in black," and the others sang, "Wade in the
water."

"They flew away, now they wadin' back."

Willie felt like a kid sneakin' back
home after a night out that he didn't particularly want his folks
to know about. On the other side of the river was home—the ranch he
had visited throughout his childhood and youth, where his father
had once worked as foreman, where he himself had worked after he
tried to quit music. Seven years ago he would never have
imagined
he'd
be a wetback
making a clandestine crossing. Hell's bells, he was an American
citizen—they all were except Terry Pruitt. They were all beginning
to realize what fragile protection their citizenship was when the
right people had been bought and paid for.

Now here he was, here they all were, singing
any old song that came into their heads while trying to evade the
authorities at a remote spot along the Rio Grande. Participating in
whatever music the banjo suggested was better protection than
silence, or weapons, or arguments. The banjo's power was their best
shield and early warning system, since it always started playing
songs pertinent to whatever danger or problem was about to jump on
them. Sometimes it just didn't play soon enough.

On the other side of the river, Willie
stopped to dry himself off with the part of his T-shirt that hadn't
dragged in the river, pulled off his jeans, socks, and boots, wrung
out the jeans and socks, and dumped water out of his boots. Juli
wrung out her skirt, and behind her Brose, Faron, Ellie, Terry, and
Dan also dripped out of the water and rearranged their
clothing.

The banjo was still tinkling with "Wade in
the Water." Julianne Martin took another handful of skirt and wrung
it between her hands. Suddenly she stood still and stared back at
the river, feeling a rushing inside herself as great as the flood
of the night before. "Hey, you guys! It works! Did you notice how
we seem to be remembering these songs, even though we're home? I
mean, we relearned the European ones, right? But then there was
'Wade in the Water'—"

"We were in Mexico when Willie remembered La
Llorona," Faron reminded her. "Maybe they're respecting borders.
Besides, Mexicans still use their folk music a lot, and it's
probably harder for the devils to get at them with all of their
songs still being sung so often and by so many people. And we
weren't exactly in the U.S. yet when we remembered 'Wade in the
Water,' besides which, we didn't sing the original words."

"Could be it worked on account of it was a
black gospel song and I'm here," Brose said. "But that didn't work
the last time. Maybe just because it's religious."

"They do seem a little more responsive to
hymns than you'd expect strictly nonpartisan devils to be," Faron
replied. "But we haven't had occasion to try out many Buddhist
gospel songs on them. Next time let's see if 'Om Mani Padme Om'
works."

"There's always the 'Zen Gospel Song,' Bryan
Bowers used to sing," Dan reminded him. "Although in our present
position, 'Om on the Range' would probably be more
appropriate."

"No, really," Julianne said, her voice
sounding far off. Willie looked at her sharply. She was staring
into the distance as if she were listening. "Do you feel it? I feel
as if all the songs that I lost before just came flooding back into
me. I never realized it, but they left an empty space inside me
somewhere. We've learned lots of things I didn't know already, of
course, but this is like—well, weird. Maybe we should try to
remember a song from this country that we used to know before."

Anna Mae grunted. "How about that Mark
Graham Zen Gospel tune, ‘I Have Seen Your Aura and It's Ugly.'
"

That was about as close as Willie had ever
heard Anna Mae come to kidding somebody, but Juli was so set on
what she was feeling, she didn't seem to notice. "Sorry," she said.
"I can't remember that one because I never knew it, but you could
do it."

Willie remembered the song, however, and he
started singing it. Brose countered with an a cappella of "House of
the Rising Sun," after which he nodded vigorously. "Yeah. Great.
It's workin' okay."

"Super," Willie said. "So now we know we've
got access to at least our own old songs as well as the ones we
brought back. I guess the banjo told us straight when it said that
by taking the music back to its roots we could retrieve it."

"Let me try one," Dan said, but Willie shook
his head.

"We're still sitting ducks, and we've got a
long walk ahead of us to where we're supposed to rendezvous with
Gussie. Keep hummin' to yourself, though, and try to remember as
much as you can. We'll need all the ammo we can get against these
critters once they realize we made it over here."

Tickled pink to have their repertoires
reinstated, even though they were rusty from lack of practice and
Lazarus was the only instrument available, the musicians spent the
rest of their traveling time that predawn morning singing snatches
of songs to each other.

* * *

Gussie awoke at dawn and drove to the first
truck stop for three cups of coffee, which she knew good and well
would make her pee clear across Arizona and New Mexico. She looked
for some kind of music to play in the San's fancy sound system had
but didn't see anything displayed at the truck stop. She asked
about it, and the cashier directed her to a bank of instructional
tapes on various languages, how to interpret the stock market, how
to improve her presentation, and a lot of other topics that were of
no particular interest to her. "I was looking for music tapes," she
said.

The bored-looking cashier pointed to another
rack, which held a single row of tapes and a single row of CDs by
nobody she had ever heard of with one exception, "Soul-less" by
Duck Soul. Remembering that the van's system contained a CD player,
she selected a square disk box and paid for it.

Back on the road she popped it in, but the
first cut was the god-awfulest collection of noise she had ever
heard, not at all like the hypnotic hard rock she remembered Soul
playing when he barged into the private folk festival at Anna Mae
Gunn's house, just before everything started getting totally out of
hand.

She turned off the tape player and tried the
radio. No music channels anywhere. Nothing but boring, depressing
newscasts and financial and farm reports, the latter all bad.

She listened to hog prices, which were down,
as were pork bellies and alfalfa, just to hear about something
familiar. She tuned up and down the dial twice before she realized
her problem was that she was lonely. She had started this journey
with a sense of anticipation, knowing she would see the friends
from whom she had been separated for the last year or so, while she
did her storytelling as sort of advance preparation for their
arrival. For the best part of seven years she had been surrounded
by people—and not just family, friends, and co-workers as she used
to be. Shoot, in Scotland she'd not only been with the musicians
and with Faron and Ellie most of the time, she'd also been sharing
her body with Sir Walter's spirit, and having once made room for
him, she now felt as if part of her was vacant—it was a little like
grieving for a man dead years and years before she was born. Since
returning to the States she had been alone only for little snatches
between storytelling audiences.

She missed her cats, most of them
still at her old house in Tacoma where her kids Lettie and Mic now
lived. Pretty soon she wouldn't be able to keep up the mortgage
payments, wandering like this, and unless Mic found a better job,
the kids wouldn't be able to buy it. Her favorite cat, Satana, had
died while she was in Scotland. She missed her kids, her cats, her
friends—and she badly missed Sir Walter too. She wished he could
have come with her, but he'd had to return to his rest when the
time came for her to go. She still had the copy of
Lay of the Last Minstrel
she'd
bought at Abbotsford, and in a way it was like having Wat still
with her. But not quite. Right now she was so lonesome she even
missed that redheaded hussy of a Debauchery Devil, whatever the
critter called herself.

She would be glad to get off this long
highway and be among friends again. But she didn't speed or even
pull out into the fast lane, or in any way, shape, or form draw
attention to herself. Bad enough that the van was obviously new,
with dealer's plates instead of conventional ones. The devils had
connections in law enforcement, and she didn't want to attract the
wrong kind of Smokey . . . or even the right kind.

* * *

The devils also had connections among
automobile dealerships, especially in Las Vegas, and once they had
checked the jet flights and the buses, they found the dealer who
had sold Gussie the van. But they got a late start. They didn't
discover what the old lady was up to until Torchy showed up drunk
around noon mortal-time after a night of gaming, drinking, and
turning tricks, which was her favorite way of relaxing, and gave
them a garbled version of her activities and handed over the money
she'd made from prostitution to the Chairdevil.

"What do I want with this?" he asked.

"Aw, c'mon, boss, keep it. It's just not
traditional for me to keep it all," she'd said, and told them a
long-drawn-out version of how she had picked up and lost Gussie.
After that they called the meeting to decide what to do.

The Chairdevil didn't exactly take the whole
thing seriously anyway, since he had his preparations in place in
Texas already to meet the weary travelers as they attempted the
border crossing. Even desultory investigation turned up Gussie
Turner's connection with the minivan, and the Chairdevil put out an
all-points on her, until her van was finally spotted outside of
Albuquerque.

CHAPTER 3

The man who had once been Willie MacKai's
boss looked over the latest applicant for the remaining position as
ranch hand. "This is a very impressive résumé, son," he said,
slapping the folder down on the desk beside his kangaroo-skin
booted heels. "Yes, sir, very impressive. B.A. in English, M.A. in
creative writing and a minor in folklore from UT, and M.B.A. from
Baylor. Manager of a small-press publishin' house in Houston.
Mighty impressive if I was lookin' for a schoolteacher. Lord, son,
whatever made you think of applyin' for a job as a ranch hand?"

"Well, sir, as you can see by my
résumé," Spencer Guttenberg indicated the folio on the desk with a
soft and well-cared-for hand sullied only by dishwashing jobs to
help pay for extracurricular activities while he'd been doing all
that schooling, "I am already qualified and am, in fact, a poet.
I'm a member of PEN and have had several works published in
Harper's
and
The New Yorker
as well as the small presses
before I acquired my M.B.A.—"

"Is that a fact?"

"Yes, sir, but you see, when I take stock of
my life, I realize that writing poetry is only half of what I wish
to do. Actually, I was inspired in college by the works of J. Frank
Dobie, Curley Fletcher, and S. Omar Barker. You see, sir,
it's—uh—actually my ambition to be a cowboy poet, and so far I've
only had the time to do the latter half. So I thought I would like
to apply for a job—oh, not as a foreman or anything, just as an
apprentice ranch hand, you might say—and then I would learn the
cowboy side of things."

"You don't say?"

"Yes, sir."

"A cowboy poet?"

"That's right, sir."

"Well, now, son, I know all about J. Frank
Dobie. Used to have a hand who was quite an authority on him,
though this fella was more in the line of a guitar player and
singer than he was a poet—still, he knew a lot about it. I never
heard of them other fellas though."

"Haven't you heard the song taken from the
Curley Fletcher poem, 'The Strawberry Roan'?" Guttenberg asked.

"Oh,
that
song. I ain't heard that in years. Do you
know it?"

"A little," Guttenberg said, adjusting his
spectacles. "I forgot it for a while, and then I found it in a
collection of poems."

"You'll have a lot to learn if I give you
this job, son. Cowboyin' is different than schoolboyin'."

"I know that, sir," Guttenberg said with the
beginning of a gleam in his eye. "And I will endeavor to remember
Fletcher's immortal words in order to maintain proper perspective
and humility. 'I know there are ponies that I cannot ride. /
There's some of them left, / They haven't all died. / But I'll bet
all my money the man ain't alive / That'll stay with old Strawberry
when he makes his high dive.' "