World Made by Hand (32 page)

I was nearest to the grill, so I got up and turned the chicken while Loren poured Wayne another whiskey-and another for himself.

"You fellas are good guests," he said. "Maybe you'll come back some night with your wives. And you," he said, meaning me, "you bring your damn fiddle. We'll have ourselves a time."

"What do you say about the warrants," Loren said.

"I admire them. They have the right look and all. Can I keep them? They'd make nice silveneers."

"Are you going to let us search for stolen goods?" Loren said.

"Of course not."

"Are you going to surrender and come on in with us?"

"Are you crazy?"

"Are you going to turn over Bunny Willman."

"Hell no."

"Then your position is that you're above the law?" Loren said.

"That ain't my position, it's my reality. How are you going to enforce this got-damn nonsense?"

"You'll be surprised," I said.

"Tell me. I really want to know."

"If I told you, it wouldn't be a surprise, would it."

"Got me on that one," Wayne said. He pointed my way and made a show of cracking up. "Well, as I see it, we got nothing further to discuss. But you did a nice job on the chicken there, Fiddler. If you want to run out into the corn and fetch that crow, I'd throw it on the grill for you."

"No thanks."

"Then I'll take over from here."

Wayne finally lifted himself out of the lounge chair and, in his catlike way, slunk over to relieve me of the grilling tongs.

"Oh, one other thing before you leave," he said.

"What's that?"

"Have another stiff drink on me for the road. Night's falling and you're going to need it."

We hadn't gone a quarter mile down the road when we heard the footfalls behind us. Wayne's men captured us effortlessly. The gang of six he'd sent down included Bunny Willman. We didn't try to run. They tied our hands behind us, hobbled our ankles, and marched us back to Karptown-not without quite a few kicks in our asses along the way. Night had gathered by then. Stars blazed above the candlelit village and the moon was rising. The amphitheater on the village square was crowded with bodies. The same guitar player was still at it onstage, furiously scrubbing his strings, now in the glow of a dozen tin candle lamps arrayed around the lip of the stage.

A couple of wooden armchairs were set up at both extremes of the stage. They put Loren in the one on the left and me in the one on the right and bound us into them so we couldn't move. The haze of marijuana was so thick that I might have gotten high myself if I hadn't been so overwhelmed with dread. The audience was passing jugs around. They evinced the same chatty excitement that crowds always do before a public spectacle, whether it's a musical or a comedy show or a hanging. Of course, I worried about what part we were going to play in the evening's entertainment. Eventually Wayne emerged from the front door of his compound, along with several cohorts, and made his way down an aisle to the stage. He hopped up fluidly with a clipboard under his arm like the recreational director on a cruise ship. The guitar player stopped bashing his strings and ambled off stage. A hush fell over the audience as Wayne began to speak.

"Let's give Woody a big hand for putting out so much positive energy. Woody always brings a smile," he said, presumably referring to the guitar player. The crowd responded with some feeble clapping.

"As you can see-hey, pipe down out there-as you can see, we got some special guests for the main part of tonight's show." This provoked a mix of cheers, jeers, catcalls, whistles, and raspberries from the crowd. Someone threw a hunk of something-corn bread perhaps -at Loren. It bounced off his temple harmlessly. "Hey, watch out there, Mojo," Wayne said, wagging a finger. "It ain't up to you to start in on that." The audience laughed knowingly. "Before we get underway with the feature presentation, we have a couple of warmup acts I hope you'll all enjoy, including our special guests." Wayne glanced at his clipboard. "First, we got Ricky Z, Potato, Tracy Ballard, Jesse, Pinky, and Little Eric doing highlights from episode sixty-six of The Sopranos, starring Potato as Tony. "Won't you please give them a big hand."

This mummery went on at considerable length. A few of the "actors" were good mimics. The story was incoherent. I barely remembered the TV series anyway. That I even got sucked into trying to follow it, though, was a testament to their earnestness. Their antics elicited a lot of laughs, though I don't think the dramatic events depicted were necessarily funny, since they mostly involved the characters abusing each other verbally, when someone was not getting shot or beaten up.

When the long piece concluded and the actors had taken their curtain calls, Wayne came back out. An insect changing of the guard had occurred with nightfall: deerflies hack to headquarters, mosquitoes out in ravening swarms. With my hands bound to the chair, I could only endure their bites. My shoulders were killing me, and I had to pee so badly I was sure I'd have to go in my pants sooner or later. Loren looked like he was suffering too.

"Next up, give a nice welcome to Casey Zito, Torry Zito, Jarrod Zito, the fabulous Zito brothers, doing one of your old favorites, "Creeping Death" by Metallica. Give 'em a big hand."

Three teenage boys came out, bearing an obvious family resemblance, ranging from perhaps thirteen to eighteen. The oldest one wore a braided goatee and had the tribal tattoos over his eyes. He carried an acoustic guitar. The middle brother came out with what looked like a yard-square piece of aluminum roofing material, and the youngest had a big conga drum. They took an eternity setting up and tuning. The performance itself consisted of the middle brother making a thunderous racket by bending, warping, and banging the square of sheet metal while the youngest boy furiously slapped his drum. The guitar player thrashed his strings and struggled to be heard singing above the din his brothers made. I thought it would never end, and then I thought the audience would never stop clapping. The oldest boy said, "We'd sing another one, but we ain't practiced."

After they got off, a couple of men brought out a mattress and laid it in the middle of the stage. Then they brought out a sofa and put it behind the mattress. Wayne came back out, exhaling an impressive cloud of smoke in the footlights.

"Okay, okay, hush up, now," he said. "This next act, the last time we tried it, the man upstairs sent us a young one, and you know we need a little help that way lately, so give a big hand to Skooch and Melinda doing this scene from that old triple-X favorite, Teacher's Pet."

A nubile woman perhaps in her twenties came out and sat on the sofa. She was wearing a white blouse and a short plaid skirt with knee socks.

"I'm a schoolgirl," she said and giggled. Then she opened a big book, like an atlas, and pretended to study.

"Ding-dong," a voice cried offstage.

"Oh, gee, somebody's at the door," Melinda said. "I wonder who it is."

She got off the sofa and went to the side of the stage, right in front of me, actually.

"Why, Mr. Skooch. What are you doing here?"

Skooch entered, a powerful young man with his long black hair tied up in a ponytail, wing tattoos over his eyebrows in the Karptown style, and braided beard too. He was costumed in a shiny old suit jacket and a necktie, but no shirt.

"Why, hello, Melinda," he said. "The principal, Mr. Dingus, has a new policy of sending us teachers out on house calls to our favorite students, and you're my special pet."

"Really? What a coincidence, Mr. Skooch, because you're my favorite teacher," Melinda said. "But it seems you forgot your shirt."

"No, this is our new official summer school attire."

"Gosh," Melinda said, "maybe I should get more comfortable too."

This launched the old scenario familiar to those of us who had lived through the age when recorded pornography was a bigger business than Hollywood proper. Except it was a live stage show, being played out about ten feet from my chair, not an image on a laptop computer or a hotel TV screen. Soon the two performers crossed the line beyond playacting into the realm of raw animal instinct. I watched the audience as they watched the show with uniformly rapt attention, including the five or six children present. Loren followed the action with an unreadable blank expression, though his face looked unnaturally flushed. As the tension mounted on stage, the audience members took up the chant, "Go, go, go, go . . ." and when Skooch concluded his exertions, a wave of sustained applause swept the amphitheater. Then it was over, though the odors of procreation lingered on stage in the still, moist air. The performers seemed to rapidly recover their decorum. They declined a curtain call and bustled efficiently off stage.

The stagehands struck the set. Wayne came back on.

"That was great, Melinda and Skooch. Just like the real thing-" Shouts from the audience. "Yeah, I guess you're right, Roy, that was the real thing. We sure hope that brings a little magic for you especially Melinda-that the man upstairs will smile on you and start baking a little bun in your oven. Thank you both. Now, onto tonight's feature. We have a couple of visitors on board tonight. They came out here earlier to talk to me. I did my darndest to be nice. Gave 'em drinks. Grilled up some pullets. And I got to say, they were just rude. Sassy. Impolite. Served me with papers. Imagine that! It's an old-time thing, for those of you too young to remember. A government agent serves you with papers andI don't care which way you cut it-it comes down to this: they want to take away your property or they want to take away your freedom. No, don't argue."

Nobody was arguing, of course. Least of all me and Loren. Nobody in the seats made a peep.

"That's how it is," Wayne said. "Always has been, always will be. Anyway, these two come up from town. This one on my left here, he says he's the new mayor down there in the Grove. That right?" Wayne stepped my way, to see if I was paying attention, I guess. "You hear me? I axed if that's how you represent yourself?"

I didn't answer.

"Whatever. I hope politics don't ruin him. I forget his name. Fiddler Joe, I call him, because I seen him play once at a Harvest Ball up to Hebron or White Creek or some damn place. I forget. He's good. Got-damn good fiddler. You could use coaching on the administration of justice end of things, though. You could study with me at five hundred dollars the hour. Have your secretary call my secretary and we'll see what we can get going. Anyway, this other fella to my right. You going to tell me your name?"

Loren didn't speak either.

"All right. Well, I just call him Preacher Man. He's a minister down at the main church there in town. He says he's the constable now too. Can you imagine that? A man of God serving the very ones that want to deprive somebody of his property and his freedom. It just don't add up. But I'm only a common man. What do I know? I'm common as dirt, ain't l?" Wayne said and started circling around the stage toward Loren, for whom he now seemed to have a special animus, judging by his increasingly loud voice. "And if I'm common as dirt, you all out there must be dirt too, because, after all, I am your chief, I am your fearless leader, I'm of you and you're of me. So we must all be ... dirt," Wayne said, spitting out that last word as his anger ratcheted higher. "What do you think, Preacher Man? Are we beneath you as the soil is beneath you?"

Loren remained silent.

"Well, I intend to show you what we're made of tonight by giving you a lesson. It ain't Sunday, so this won't be a Sunday school lesson, exactly. Maybe it's philosophy. There's some biology involved, so put in a bid for science too. I really don't know. Education was never my strong suit. Except for shop class. I gotdamned excelled at taking things apart-though I didn't much care for putting them back together. Anyways, the aim here is to demonstrate what is in God's realm and what's in man's, and maybe how they shouldn't run together in one person 'cause you will only end up confusing people while coming to grief yourself. By the way, this lesson is free of charge. Before I'm done with you, I imagine you will be speaking to God in person. You might ax him how he came to put you in such a pickle."

Wayne stooped down and glared into Loren's eyes.

"How dare you serve me with papers? You nor nobody else down in that town will ever even think about doing it again." Then he stood back up. "Okay, boys. Bring out the glory wheel."

Four stagehands brought up some kind of hulking wooden apparatus from the rear, behind the stage. There was a steel pipe running into a hub at center that they fitted into a hole in the floor at center stage. The apparatus proved to be a plywood wheel about eight feet in diameter. Once they got it in place, they spun it around. It clattered noisily along the floorboards on casters. On the top surface of the wheel stood a simple wooden contraption that I quickly understood to be a set of stocks, with holes for the arms and one for the neck.

"There she is, friends," Wayne said. "The Round Widow, Proud Mary, the Devil's Dance Floor, the Prayer Stool, the Old Rugged Redeemer-we have lots of names for her. Some of the folks out in the cheap seats have rode on her, since this is the approved method for settling the accounts of misdoers hereabouts. But you two are the first outsiders to get in on the action-except for a stray picker or two over the years, and they hardly qualified as people. Boys, help the Preacher Man up onto her and make sure he's comfortable."

Several of Wayne's men freed Loren from the chair that he was bound into and steered him onto the wheel. They had to shove him down to get him to kneel before the stocks, and he resisted as they forced his head and hands in the slots and bolted the top down.

"There's no point putting up a fight, Preacher Man. I guarangot-damn-tee that this will go better if you just let go and relax. That tension works against you. Think happy thoughts. Like you just got a hand job from some parish lady in the-"

"Fuck you," Loren said.

"Huh?" Wayne said.

"You lowlife piece of shit."

"Ouch! My ears suddenly hurt," Wayne said. "What a way for a preacher man to talk. And there are children present." Wayne slunk catlike across the stage toward me and bent down close to my face. "Does he talk to your homefolks like that?"

I didn't say anything. I didn't want to say anything.

"Can't hear you, Fiddler," Wayne said. "Well if he don't talk that way to the homefolks then I suppose he saves it for the likes of us. That's interesting."

An indignant murmur ran through the crowd, then whistling and some shouts.

Wayne slithered back toward Loren in the stocks. He took something out of his pocket and stooped down to apply it to Loren's face. It turned out to be a florid red lipstick-whenever they took a house apart, they came up with all sorts of things-and he painted Loren's face with it, giving him a red clown nose, red lips, red eyebrows, and two red clown dots on his cheeks.