Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (9 page)

"What the hell are they?" Gussie asked.

"The ghost lights," he said, as if she
should have known.

"Ghost what?"

"The ghost lights. You're in Marfa. Those
are our famous ghost lights."

She sighed. "It figures," she said, and
leaned toward the front window and waved, calling, "It's okay,
boys! I'm fine now! I'm with friends! Thanks! Y'all can go back to
hauntin' that field again!"

They bobbed a few times up and down, split
up, circled each other, and receded.

CHAPTER 6

"It seems to me," Barbara said, "that there
are a lot of coincidences in your story, Ute. That woman seems to
know a lot of people."

"She'd been movin' around some, and runnin'
with people who moved around for a livin'. Also, ma'am—"

"Barbara—" the woman said, looking a little
pained, as if it were a wearisome task always to have to be
educating people—even women—to the politically correct etiquette of
the moment. She also looked as if she saw a certain amount of humor
in the need to do so, however, and added by way of explanation,
"We're to call you Ute, so as far as I'm concerned, you may call me
Barbara. But I draw the line at Babs or Barbie."

"Fair enough, Barbara.
Anyhow, as I was tellin' you before, Gussie had been a part of a
pretty small group—what you might call a subculture—for some time.
Folk musicians, and what later were called acoustic or alternative
musicians, traveled around like Gypsies or Indian tribes, swappin'
songs, swappin' venues. Some
of 'em stayed
put, but even those got to know fellow musicians from a different
place when they came to visit, and they tended to put each other up
or recommend one another to supporters who would offer a spare bed
to a traveling minstrel. Sometimes, after the music lost its
broader popularity and the number of fans dropped, supporters got
to know each other too, fans, agents, reviewers, record
distributers, journalists, prose
writers,
poets—even cowboy poets, logger poets, and maritime poets. Union
organizers too—people with causes."

"Well, of course I've heard that music has
been used in conjunction with causes," Barbara said. "One or two
members have suggested that we employ it, but on the whole using
something so frivolous seems to me to undermine the seriousness of
the message we're attempting to communicate."

"I'm sure you know best about that,
ma'am—'scuse me, Barbara, but it seems to me that if you 're tryin'
to send your message to a lot of people, you need to communicate on
a lot of different levels. Talkin' is going to reach some people
with a tin ear to whom the emotions behind a topic are irrelevant
ways to manipulate people. They'd prefer to manipulate statistics
and let them manipulate people. But for a lot of folks, if you can
tell them what you 're talking about and make it into a story that
shows how it could affect people like themselves and put it to a
tune they can whistle if they're so inclined, they're going to
remember that a lot longer than a statistic or a speech."

"Perhaps," she said. "But I believe most
people approach the important issues in a more rational
manner."

Ute nodded sadly and stirred the campfire
with a stick, adding some sage and broken-off bits of tumbleweed.
"I expect you 're right about that. Which in a way is my point. The
people who understood and appreciated the kind of music I'm
referrin' to were not a large majority of the population anymore,
and so, in order to find the kind of thing they enjoyed, they
corresponded with each other and talked on the telephone and went
to visit one another at festivals. When someone they particularly
wanted to hear was playin' in a town where another supporter they
knew happened to live they'd visit one another's homes. That's how
the subculture got started. 'Course, like any other small group of
opinionated people, they fought a lot among themselves over little
stuff that a lot of times didn't amount to much more than ego and
hurt feelings."

"Now that I can understand," Heather-Jon
said. "The way some of the New York ecofeminist group carry on, you
'd think every one of us out in the west had personally cut down
all the trees, slaughtered the wolves, and poured oil and paint
thinner into the rivers and ocean on a regular basis. And done it
because we were trying to get dates with loggers and
industrialists."

"You did notice that we don’t cut down a lot
of rain forest here in order to feed our cows, didn't you?" Ute
asked.

"But aren't you aware that irresponsible
ranching has extended the desert lands?" Barbara asked.

"At one time, yes," he said. "But we've
abandoned those practices. That's one reason the boss has started
hirin' himself what he likes to think of as the creative cowhand.
Managin' any kind of resources today and takin' the kind of pride
in your work it takes to do a good job, the boss feels, involves
havin' a sense of your own tradition, of where that tradition's
brought us in terms of how it affects people. It takes brains to
think up ways to save wear and tear on everybody. For instance, you
talk about the problems with the desert and the drought down here.
Can you think of any better way to explain this country to, say,
one of your friends in New York, than with lines like the ones Tim
Henderson wrote back in the eighties?

"Dust in the living room blown from the
yard,

You sweep and you mop and you dust the place
hard;

Red light'nin' at night, ain't no sign of
rain,

So you oil up your dust rag and you dust
once again."

"We-ell," Barbara said. "I think I see what
you mean, but that song could be taken as somewhat reactionary,
speaking only to traditional homemakers."

"For Christ's sake, Barbara," Shayla said.
"Who is it that we're always having trouble communicating with if
it's not the traditional homemakers who got so turned off by the
movement's radical roots that they'd poison their petunias just to
spite us? He's right. This sort of thing might reach them."

"What were those lines about the wife
telling her employee to dust more slowly?" Heather-Jon asked.

Ute sang,

"And the ranch wife calls out,

Joselita go slow;

You're sweepin' up dreams

From the Edwards Plateau."

"Yes," Heather-Jon said. "It's beautiful.
Don't you see, Barbara, how those lines address the solidarity of
the ranch wife with the women of the other region and her attempt
to involve her minority employee, increasing awareness of the
environmental problems besetting the lives of other women?"

"Yeah," Shayla said. "No other reason to ask
your house-cleaner to go slow. God knows their hourly wage is
enough that it seems to take them forever to clean most houses as
it is."

They debated about it for a while until
pretty soon Heather-Jon got bored and began to think this was not
feeling much like a vacation, even a working holiday. When she
looked across the fire, she caught Ute's eye and said, 'Yes, I can
see how being a part of both this country and that sort of music
might create a bond between the policeman and Gussie. It just seems
fortunate for her that it was he who was in the cafe."

“
Yes, it was. But then,
there was just as much that was unfortunate happening, so I guess
it all evened out, you might say. Anyway, strictly in the line of
duty, Buddy drove Gussie back to her vehicle, and though her
battery was run down from her leaving the lights on, neither her
purse nor her other money was touched. He took her back to his
house until he got off duty and arranged it so he could drive with
her over to the ranch three counties away in case the crazy man
came after her again. He filled out his report of what happened to
her and fudged it a little so that he could ride shotgun for
Gussie. Both of them figured from past experience that the crazy
knifer was probably looking for her specifically rather than mature
women in brown minivans in general. He just couldn 't go into his
plan in any detail with the department, because of Gussie being the
quasi-desperado that she was."

* * *

The hands were on the lookout for Gussie
along the rendezvous point, and when Gussie in her minivan and
Buddy in his own truck showed up, Nobby and Swede pointed them
toward the big house, where the boss and Willie were in deep
discussion with Dally Morales over a six-pack of near-beer. The
boss had a heart attack the year Willie left, which was when he
decided that maybe his liquor and his cigars didn't matter to him
so much as doing something a little different in his life, and that
was about the time he looked into taking on cowboy poets and a few
cowgirls as well, tradin' one kind of stimulation for another, you
might say.

The big house was Spanish style, cottonwood
and adobe. The housekeeper was Dally's sister, Carmencita, and she
really did do her best to keep the house more or less clean, but
the boss was the kind of man who believed that the way to know
where everything is was to always have it out in plain sight or at
least have some idea of which layer it was under. Tack was of
course supposed to stay out with the tack, and there were plenty of
people to oil leather and to doctor stock and so forth;
nevertheless, there were oily rags and bits and saddles,
flea-bitten blankets and a stretched-out rattlesnake hide, deer
skulls waiting to be discovered by Georgia O'Keefe imitators or
Dallas interior decorators, and all kinds of books, mostly history
and poetry, and papers all over the house.

Carmencita kept laundering the rugs and the
Mexican blankets that hung on the wall because the boss's two
mongrel dogs and six cats kept bringing in bugs of one kind or
another.

Willie and the boss were the only ones still
up by the time Gussie and Buddy drove up to the big house. Willie
pounded them both on the back, hugged them, and made introductions.
The house still smelled like the chili Carmencita served for
dinner, and Gussie's eyes watered almost as much as her mouth from
the fragrance.

"Glad to sec you finally made it, darlin',"
Willie told Gussie. "Damn, it's good to see you."

"I almost didn't get here at all," she said.
"I've got a lot to tell you. Where are the others?"

"Turned in already." He ran his hands
through his thinning hair. "We've got a lot to tell you too, but
everybody else was so worn-out they hit the hay early. We didn't
get us a whole lot of sleep last night. But you know me, Gus. I'm a
nocturnal critter, and bein’ shot at does wonders for gettin' my
adrenaline pumping, even at my age."

"I know what you mean," she said.

He turned to Buddy. "We can use your advice
too, my friend. We seem to have a law-and-order type problem on our
hands."

Buddy asked what it was, and Willie told him
about the murdered Mexican family and the murderers still tied up
and locked in the root cellar. "I hope there's a family of rattlers
down there to do them in," he said, "but I'm afraid the snakes
would extend professional courtesy."

Buddy began guiding them through the
channels of authority he thought were most likely to be realistic
and flexible, and the boss called a couple of favors in from old
friends. Gussie listened for a while, feeling more and more hungry,
more and more sleepy, and more and more out of her depth in the
conversation. She had no good idea what they ought to do, and even
if she had, she couldn't have gotten a word in edgewise. Finally
she cut in to ask if there was someplace she could sleep, and the
boss left the others talking long enough to show her the two guest
rooms at the head of the stairs, where the other women were
sleeping. The men were bunking with the hands. "I'm sorry there's
only two beds in each room, ma'am," the boss told her. "You could
actually have my bed if you liked, but—"

"It's okay," she said. "You got a
couch?"

"That's no place for a lady."

"Mister, I appreciate the courtesy, but this
lady couldn't possibly climb all those stairs in the shape I'm in.
I'll just bunk down out there."

"Fine," he said. "Feel free to turn on the
television. We got a nice satellite dish, so reception's pretty
good."

The evenings were too cool for
air-conditioning, but the front door was left open, the screen door
latched, so a slow swell of lukewarm air moved through the room.
The cats had their own flap and came and went all night, bringing
more things that tickled and itched. The dogs scratched and in
their dreams growled almost as loud as Gussie's stomach. She was so
tired she had thought she would sleep a week, and she would have
sworn that when Willie wandered into the living room about the time
the sun made her toss off her blanket that she hadn't slept a
wink.

Willie looked down at her. She knew he was
no early riser. He had never been to bed. He was chewing a peanut
butter sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee.

"What I wouldn't give for an Egg McMuffin,"
she groaned, sitting up.

"Carmencita's fixin' us up sack lunches and
some breakfast," Willie said. "Meanwhile, why don't you fill me in?
Buddy said somethin' about you gettin' chased around by some
asshole who thought he was Geronimo or somethin', shootin' at you
with a bow and arrow."

As she began telling him about meeting
Torchy, the gambling winnings, and the trip from Las Vegas
culminating with meeting the maniac outside of Marfa, the others
sleepily filed into the room, rubbing their eyes, dry-brushing
their teeth, or chewing on a pre-breakfast munchie. Halfway through
Gussie's story, Carmencita called them into the kitchen and they
downed coffee,
huevos
rancheros
, homemade tortillas, steaks, and hash
browns, with cinnamon buns added for good measure.