Phantom Banjo (22 page)

They asked for it

They mapped destiny in their stars

'Cause in their former lives

They did not learn to be wise

And what we do to others will be ours.

"I've studied hard and learned all these
lessons carefully

It's freed me of my grief and guilt and set
my spirit free

For my life and love I'll take
res-pon-si-bil-ity

I've grown and will allow good things to come
to me

"And I've asked for it

Now I'm happy and wholesome and strong

Oh I've asked for it

For it’s never life that’s wrong

We choose our own notes as we sing our own
song

My song belongs to no one else

'Cause I asked for it

And this is what I've gotten for myself."

Of course, Gussie reminded herself, sometimes
even in this music the lyrics could be a lot of hogwash.

Willie had sauntered up beside her to lean
against the tree and now he caught her eye with one of his
bloodshot ones. His face was a caution, and in spite of herself
Gussie almost giggled. He looked as if he'd taken a bite out of an
apple and met up with the ass end of a worm. "I do believe that's
the single most god-awful song I've ever heard in my life," he
said.

"I suppose you can't tell a book by its
cover," Gussie said, "but I don't see how a nice girl like that can
truly believe that kind of thing."

Faron Randolph had been heading for Willie
but had been arrested by Juli's performance. Now he took the last
step toward them, grinning and scratching his head. "Sounds to me
like what happens when someone raised Calvinist-style hard-shell
Baptist takes up Zen Buddhism and gets tangled up in their own
karma," he said.

Eric Havelock sat on the log ahead of Gussie
and now he turned and said, "So that's what they meant by 'opiate
of the masses,' " all the while looking at Juli as if she were a
particularly interesting microorganism. "I'll be damned."

"If she's right about what it takes," Willie
said, nodding toward the stage, "you're gonna have a lot of
company, buddy."

They were the only dissenters within hearing
distance, however. The applause almost drowned out their
disgruntled comments and Juli beamed with the benign smile of a
missionary who had just won over the cannibals.

While she was singing, two men and a woman
kept putting big slabs of red-basted ribs on the big barbecue
grill. The savory smells rising from it rivaled the underlying odor
of manure, and lines formed three deep until the grill was no
longer visible except for the smoke.

* * *

Gussie sat fanning herself. Those other folks
could just go right on ahead of her, never mind how spicy-rich the
ribs smelled. It might be well after her usual dinnertime but the
sky was still clear except for a thin strip of white cloud over the
river way off beyond the unfinished condo complex. The heat waves
shimmered up from the grill, so the air all around looked like
sun-warped plastic. Julianne, sitting on a log and eating sweet
corn, licked her fingers and wiped sweat from her forehead with her
wrist. "They didn't really need to light the grill today," she
joked to Gussie. "Could have cooked everything on the stage without
ever starting a fire. I just keep remembering how good sweating is
for your pores."

"Uh-huh," Gussie said, but she wasn't feeling
all that much like chumming up to Julianne after that last song of
hers. If that self-righteous sweet young thing knew even a teeny
little bit of what Gus's life had been like, she'd probably say it
was a wonder Gus hadn't got herself turned into a cockroach by
now.

The little strip of gray on the horizon
stretched itself into a long boa over the highway, which was hidden
by a rise in the pastureland. But where that strip grew, the air
seemed to split and Gussie could just make out a noise, insistent
as the buzz of a yellow jacket but more of a thump-thump-thump, the
distance-muted blare of a radio turned up loud. The smoky rail rose
into the sky, and seemed to draw cloud out of the blue as it did,
tainting the clarity with corruption and noise. Then despite the
people the rumble and the blare grew louder, the cloud, a dust
cloud, she could smell it now, rising a ways down the corduroy
road, and over the hill in a heat shimmer of its own a red van
bounced blaring and booming into the driveway. It was shiny as a
candy apple, despite the dust cloud, and it had one of those
special paint jobs, orange flames and black skull and
crossbones.

Anna Mae Gunn, who had just walked away from
the grill and had been heading in the direction of a blond-haired
man Gussie didn't remember seeing the day before, changed
direction, handed her ribs and corn to somebody else, and strode
over to the van. Gunn's black hair was in two pigtails today, tied
with leather thongs and fluffy white feathers. Her skinny brown
legs stuck out of hip-slung cutoffs and a Vancouver Folk Festival
tank top was knotted beneath the pointed bumps of her braless
breasts. She wore brown flip-flops on her feet but still looked as
if she was ready to kick ass.

The blaring noise suddenly stopped and a man
with spiky bright red hair and a sleeveless black T-shirt and black
denims crawled out of the driver's seat. He nearly had to step on
Anna Mae to put his feet onto the ground.

"What can I do for you?" the Indian woman
asked, her fists on her hips and her feet planted wide apart, as if
she expected him to try to knock her over.

"Isn't this where the Maryland Memorial Folk
Festival is being held?" the man asked, his voice soft, polite, and
mock-innocent in deliberate contrast to his hard-punk looks.

"It is."

He leaned back and hollered into the body of
the van. "It's the right place, guys. Start unloading."

"Wait a minute," Anna Mae said. "I'm the
director of the festival. Who are you and what do you do?"

"I'm sorry," the newcomer said, his hand
fluttering to his chest as if he were a mellerdrammer heroine
trying not to lose her virtue to the landlord. "I thought it was an
open invitation for anyone who wanted to donate music for the
memorial fund for Nedra and the others. I'm Duck Soul. I don't do
exactly your kind of music, but Nedra was what you might call an
intimate friend of mine and so we wanted to contribute. After all,
my kind of music does bring in more bread than your kind these days
. . ."

Intimate friend, I'll bet, Gussie thought.
Despite the spiky hair, Duck Soul was quite a hunk, muscles
rippling from the sleeveless T, chiseled cheek and jaw, electric
blue eyes.

Two other fellows who looked like bikers
who'd had a good scare began unloading the back. A few of the other
musicians, including Brose and Juli, gathered around.

"Wow, will you look at this stuff!" one of
the gospel singers exclaimed, reverently touching a piece of
electronic gear.

Anna Mae stood glaring while the heedless
Duck directed his crew to set up the equipment on the back part of
the porch, behind everyone else. There was already a sound system
but he added a few things Gussie wasn't familiar with. When his
setup was complete it looked capable of launching nuclear
missiles.

"Now just you hang on a minute," Anna Mae
said. "You can't use all that stuff. I don't know if my house
current will take it."

"Oh, dear," Soul said. "Well, we'll just have
to see, I suppose, but I'm sure it will work. It's state of the
art, you know, and takes less power than you'd think. I would have
brought my generator, but I knew this was an acoustic concert so I
tried to pack light."

"Aw, let the man have a chance, lady," Brose
said. "Ain't it all for the same thing anyway?"

"Hey, man, that's really nice of you," Soul
said.

Juli had been stroking the sleek plastic
sides of something with lots of knobs and slides and switches.
"This is amazing stuff. The technology must really free you . .
."

"You bet your sweet ass it does, baby, but
there's a lot to harnessing all this power. The blending can be a
real bitch, getting the right mix takes an exquisitely precise
touch on the knobs.”

Brose said, "A little hard to sit in, then,
ain't it?"

Soul arched a red-tinted brow at Brose. "For
some, maybe. But me, I'm good, and I'm fast, and I'm hot. The
technology just means I don't have to play my fingers off to the
knuckles to get sounds that would blow any of the rest of you
offstage."

Uh-huh, Gussie thought. There goes Mr. Nice
Guy.

"I don't know about that," Brose said slowly,
hitching his guitar up on his belly like a gunslinger hitching up
his holsters.

"How about a duel?" Havelock suggested
sarcastically. "Electric current against talent and skill."

"Don't be such an asshole, man," Soul said,
still easily but with a sharp edge to his voice and a mean glitter
in his eyes. "I told you I'm good."

"This is a ritual celebration," Anna Mae
said. "Not a contest."

"How about if we were to make it
interesting?" Soul asked. "I just came here to play, donate a
little time, but you guys have an attitude problem. I'm getting a
little pissed at all this snob shit. I got ten thousand dollars for
the fund says I can outplay anybody here. Losers match it."

"Hell, man, nobody's got that kind of cash
around here," the chanteyman said.

"Or the confidence, apparently. Okay, I'm
easy. One thousand from each of you who accepts the dare, but if I
win, and you don't have the bread, I win your instruments."

"What will the ground rules be?" Brose
asked.

"Anything goes," Soul said.

"Anything?"

"I just said so."

"You're on, my man."

And so it was that male plugs were plugged
each into its female plug and balance was adjusted, slides were
slid, knobs were turned, and switches flicked. Current flowed. A
tuba tooted from the keyboard of Soul's synthesizer.

Brose sat on a stool and played a complicated
riff that mostly took place on the neck of his guitar. Duck Sole
pounced out a few chords that sounded like a funeral dirge.

Willie, the banjo still hung around him,
watched from beside the tree. He was comfortable again. A cigarette
hung between his lips and he clutched a diet soda in his hand.

Duck Soul turned his dirge into a wheeze of
sound, deceptively wispy, before his fingers lifted and dived for
the keyboard and a band boogied out—guitar, bass, drums, clarinet,
whatever was needed to round out the sound appeared when the man
struck a key.

Brose diddled through one bar of a Balkan
dance tune in response, then unslung the guitar from his neck and
tried to hand it to Duck's back. Into the mike he said, "Okay, man,
you win. Ain't no way one little old guitar is going to compete
with all that."

Duck grinned. "Then get reinforcements, man.
Anybody. Everybody. Just remember, if I beat everybody on stage, I
get a thousand bucks from each one and I take all the instruments.
Just to prove to you fuckers that the shit you play is dead. Make
you admit what real music is."

And he played on, something by Hell's Kitchen
or Broken Glass or who-the-hell knew who, Brose didn't, he didn't
listen to that shit much. Rock was okay, but it made sense to him
when an anthropologist friend of his had described it as usually
being a case of the white man ripping off the black man's music in
order to arrogate to himself some of the superior sexual prowess he
believed the black man possessed. Yeah. What he said. Sounded good
to Brose. So maybe Brose played Balkan music and all that shit to
arrogate to himself the white man's superior polkas, pastries, and
a few blond chicks. At least, according to the prof. Actually,
Brose played because he liked to, not because he had a bunch of
theories he was trying to prove. Apparently Duck Soul was not
dealing from the same deck. Too intense. One man was not going to
convince him otherwise, and neither was a whole stage full but here
they came, filing up beside Brose, that girl Juli first, the one
who'd done the weird song, with her spoons. She was taking the
whole thing as a joke, laughing.

Well, hell, girl didn't have nothing to lose
but a couple of old soup spoons.

The jug band and the Irishers followed her up
and the gospel singers who were really a couple of doctors, he knew
because they'd given him their cards. One was a sinus specialist or
some damn thing and the other was a radiologist. The guy on the
washtub bass was a lawyer with some fancy New York firm that
sounded like a Jewish family reunion.

The steel drummer added his percussion to the
lady plastic surgeon who played bodhran for the Irish group. The
steel drummer was a Japanese guy who was a railroad engineer with a
useless degree in business law of the Pacific rim. Wasn't much call
for that kind of thing where the guy lived in Arkansas so he drove
trains instead.

Soul answered their entrance with a driving
riff of his own, a one-man battle of the bands even without his
opponents. The amps were loud, the drum machine throbbing as if it
were the heartbeat of at least the state of Maryland, if not the
whole earth. Horns skirled into wild screams and the guitar was a
twenty-car freeway pileup. Soul began to sing. Anyhow, that's what
they figured he was doing because you could hear his voice even
though it was hard to make out what he was singing.

When he stopped, barely soft-pedaling the
drum machine to let them know it was their turn, Brose's ears were
still ringing with the sound.

Up front Gussie and Willie exchanged looks.
Gussie didn't even wonder why Willie didn't get up there with the
others. He looked like his head was killing him now. He would no
sooner get up there and stand in front of all those monitors
listening to all that noise screeching back at him than he would
lay his head on the barbecue grill.