Phantom Banjo (31 page)

"I know," the Debauchery Devil said sadly.
"It's already having a terrible effect on Willie. He hasn't taken a
drink since the night you almost signed him with us, Nick. Frankly,
I'm worried about him."

"We'll have him handy where you can keep an
eye on him soon enough," Nicholson promised. "As for these others,
well, where we've led them, there'll be no one to notice if the
means we use seem a little odd. It's tempting, you know, because
now that those songs aren't polluting the cosmos all the time, we
grow stronger and better able to control them all with every dead
singer, every forgotten word, every faltering note."

"Yeah, yeah, we know," said the Ignorance and
Stupidity Devil. "So what are we gonna do to 'em if we ain't usin'
minions?"

* * *

"Are you feeling okay, August?" Vicki
interrupted. "You nearly dropped a glass there when you were
telling about the ranger sticking his head out the window and
you've been shaking like a leaf ever since."

"I know. I'm such a butterfingers, "August
said, brushing her hair back with trembling fingers. "And I really
get caught up in the story."

"Me too," Lewis said. "Keep going, but get me
another beer first, okay?"

"Say, is this bunch of devils you 're talkin'
about by any chance in charge of the outfit that's been doing the
new bypass over by Shelton?" Harry asked. "I swear they have the
same modus operandi."

"Could be, Harry, "August said. "They're
still around, you know. They manage to be lots of places at once,
but they're never all that far away."

* * *

The Chairdevil enjoyed toying with his fellow
devils, especially the Stupidity and Ignorance Devil, who always
made him feel clever, so he took a while to answer. "Instead of
minions, this time, I'm going to do something creative, low-key,
and virtually undetectable to other mortals. I'll be making use of
natural hazards that have been lying in wait for a long time. In
the past they worked like, you should pardon the expression, a
charm. I hope I get to use them all but it may only take the first
one. Lye beds, underlying the water supply."

"Sounds chancy to me," the Doom and
Destruction Devil said.

"Well, I'm sentimental about it, I admit.
It's also especially clever of me to turn that damned banjo against
those people. That song it was playing is for a change a
complimentary one about us, about a wonderful coup we pulled off
about a century ago. The first verse is my favorite and tells about
my little trap. You see, there was this party going up that very
trail and one of the damn fool mortals was going to be a big hero
and thwart us from taking the rest of the party after we carefully
parched 'em to dry husks. This guy led them to a particular water
hole I happen to have contemporary plans for and voila, a hundred
percent fatality."

"Maybe," the Pestilence Devil said. The
Chairdevil's brainstorm was typical of the sort of dumb idea a
dilettante would get if he took off on his own instead of
consulting experts.

"No maybe about it," the Chairdevil said,
casting a baleful eye at the Pestilence Devil. "Since that time
they've added a toxic waste dump nearby and the well I've had dug
taps into that too. Beautiful, isn't it? Historical relevance with
modern innovations. Lots deadlier than one of the old curses, like
those cholera epidemics you were so fond of in the old days."

"A good cholera epidemic both kills and
debilitates. All your victims have to do to escape your little
curse is not drink the water. Whereas once cholera begins to
spread, nobody who comes in contact with it can escape it," the
Pestilence Devil pointed out with a craftsman's pride.

"This group's been vaccinated," the
Debauchery Devil reminded him, since she was very knowledgeable
about anything involving needles.

The Pestilence Devil glared at her. Reminding
a devil of the tragic circumstances that could thwart the best-laid
curses was, in his estimation, the height of bad manners.

* * *

‘
Black Brush National Park,’ the sign
said. ‘Rest Area 3/4 Mile.’

Well, that was good. There would surely be a
ranger station where they'd charge you three bucks per vehicle to
see America's natural wonders. The only wonder he cared about was
wondering how in the hell they'd gotten so far off the highway with
nothing to guide them back. If the ranger could tell them that,
he'd pay him the three dollars just for the information.

But the road kept winding and no little
rustic shed appeared, no uniformed, smoky-bear-hatted person of any
kind whatsoever appeared—no person at all, for that matter. At last
there was, however, a pull off into the scrub, a small building
with a roof open under the point and signs that said "Women" at one
end and "Men" at the other. Surrounding it was, as advertised, a
whole lot of black plaque embedded in the stone just below the
pump.

Brose rubbed his eyes with his fist and
yawned open-mouthed, kneeling between the driver's seat and the
passenger seat, where Faron still snoozed. "What's up, man?"

"We took the scenic route," Hawkins said.
"Want to look at the monument?"

When Brose opened the side door to the van,
Faron, Ellie, and Anna Mae awakened. Ellie groaned and buried her
face under the sofa pillow she'd been hugging. Anna Mae lay very
still, her eyes shifting to Brose as she asked, "Where are we?"

He shrugged

"We're seeing the sights," Hawkins said.

"Oboy," Faron said with mock enthusiasm.

"Let's see here," Hawkins bent over the
plaque. "It would be real good if it would say, 'Highway 84, take a
right and go five miles and you're headed for Portland.' But I
suppose that's too much to ask. No, here it says, 'Sacred
wellspring of the Hotpapa Band of Shoshone Indians, believed to
have protective and aphrodisiacal properties and to have been
instrumental in producing visions.' "

"You're making it up," Anna Mae said. "The
Department of the Interior would never say 'aphrodisiacal' to the
public. And I never heard of any Hotpapa Shoshones before."

"That's what it says right here.
Aphrodisiacal and protective. And visions. Sounds like just what we
need."

"Well, that and something for the radiator,"
Faron said. Steam was rising from beneath the hood with the hiss of
water on hot metal. "I'll get a cup."

"A magic spring, hmm," Anna Mae said. "Just
like those bastards to exploit it. Even way out here."

She grasped the pump handle, lifted and
pushed twice before she caught a glimpse of movement over by the
privy.

She turned. Hawkins and Brose were already
staring at a large man wearing a plaid shirt and homespun-looking
pants. Must be a new Banana Republic thing. Rustic-looking anyway.
He wore a slouch hat over his eyes but as he approached her vision
blurred his outline and she thought for a moment she could read
"Men" through the fabric of his shirt.

He paused a couple of feet from Faron and
stuck out a sunburned hand, pointing with a shaking finger at the
plaque.

They looked down again. A large skull and
crossbones covered most of the metal and the legend read, "Poison.
Lye Contamination."

Hawkins shook his head. "You from the EPA?"
But in the time the man had focused their attention on the plaque,
he had disappeared again.

"Where did he go? B-back to the privy?" Brose
asked.

Ellie was sitting up in the van door now,
staring hard in that direction, the whites of her eyes shining all
around the pupils. "Nope. He just—uh—beamed up. Dematerialized.
Vanished. Whatever."

"A ghost?" Brose asked.

"It wasn't a Hotpapa Shoshone," Anna Mae
said, releasing her hold on the pump handle and staring hard at the
plaque. "It's changed back now but I'm not thirsty anymore. Anybody
else?"

"There's Diet Dr Pepper in the cooler," Ellie
said. "That's good enough for me."

"Goddamn, a ghostly EPA agent," Brose said,
scratching his head. "Don't that beat all?"

"Look, there he is again," Anna Mae cried,
pointing down the road.

The figure looked solid now, except that his
image shivered slightly with the heat waves rising from the
pavement. His hand was outstretched, pointing, like Anna Mae's,
down the road.

They quickly piled back in the van with Ellie
and Faron, started the engine, made a wide U-turn, ruining some of
the nationally protected black brush resource, and bumped back the
way they had come. When they reached the spot where the ghost had
been standing, there was nothing to see, but a scant half a mile
later they found themselves on an entrance ramp to the highway.

Faron kept humming a line over and over.

"What is that song, hon?" Ellie asked.

"Well, the whole tune is gone except for this
one line, and I don't remember the original words, but I do
remember that it was originally a kind of coded map for slaves
escaping on the underground railroad. I think I'm going to call my
version 'Follow the Drinking Guard.' "

* * *

Once Willie got going, he found he was in
unusually fine voice and the car had pretty good acoustics. The
only trouble was that so many of the songs would not come back to
him. If he stuck with whatever the banjo was trying to play, he
could remember more, but with great effort, so after a time he took
to making up words to replace the ones he'd forgotten.

"Will you cut that out," the ranger said from
between gritted teeth. Sweat was rolling down his face although the
morning was still fairly cool, even with the windows rolled up.

Willie just shot him a pitying look.

"Listen to me, dumbass, this is serious shit
we're in," the ranger snarled, although it was pretty clear that
the snarl was half his tough cop act, a thin layer of bravado
covering his fear.

Willie kept fingering the banjo and a
mournful tune leaked from it, tearful note by tearful note. "Yeah,
well, the Spring Hill mine disaster was serious shit too," Willie
said, as if that were a snappy comeback.

"You're fuckin' hysterical," the ranger
moaned.

Gussie propped her chin up on her arm, opened
one eye and said, "No, he's not. There's a line in that Spring Hill
mine disaster song Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger wrote about that
terrible thing in the fifties where all those men were trapped and
killed. I don't remember the whole thing but I know that line about
living on hope and songs, Willie."

Willie nodded and the banjo accommodatingly
played the tune.

"This is no mine disaster," the ranger said.
"But we may smother anyway. How can those fuckers keep crowding us
so close without losing control themselves?" He turned to stare at
the shattered glass of his window, which was being bowed in by the
weight of a log pressing against it. In a moment the glass would be
in his lap. On the other side, the taillight of one of the wrecks
dangled outside the window near Willie's ear. The pipe truck
crowded close on the back bumper of the station wagon, grinning its
leering grin in at them while the pipes jiggled precariously
overhead.

The ranger pawed through the glove
compartment and came up with a heavy metal flashlight. "Cover your
eyes," he told them. "I'm going to break the windshield and climb
out on the hood."

"And I thought Willie watched too many
western movies," Gussie muttered, shrinking back. "You going to try
to do it with that flashlight?" she asked as he took the first
swing at the window.

"Any better ideas?" he grunted.

"Yeah, just a minute," she fished for her
tire iron in the space between the back of the front seat and where
she and Juli lay.

Willie watched with a certain benign
detachment as she handed the heavy object to the ranger. Under
normal circumstances, Willie liked to consider himself a man of
action, but nothing had been normal since Mark's call, and he still
hadn't decided whether this was one long nightmare or whether they
really had died and gone to hell. It didn't much matter. But just
to be on the safe side, when the ranger started swinging the tire
iron against the windshield he handed the banjo back to Juli and
hoisted himself up between the women.

The glass shattered on the first blow and
fell out on the second. The ranger grabbed the frame with both
hands and climbed up in the seat, sticking his head and shoulders
out over the hood. No sooner had he leaned out than the logging
truck veered, the log smashed through the shattered passenger-door
window, and the glass fell onto the passenger seat. A foot of log
occupied the space where the ranger's head would have been.

The ranger glanced back and grimaced.

Traffic picked up speed as he shoved a foot
out onto the hood and for a moment he dangled, with little more
than a leg and his butt still in the car.

The banjo, in Juli's hands, began wailing
"Another Man Done Gone." Gussie seemed to recall the second refrain
said, "He had a long chain on," and wished the ranger did.

The lawman poised kneeling on the hood,
facing the wrecker on the right, his hands outstretched to catch
the metal frame. Diesel stench and exhaust fumes blasted through
the empty windshield frame. The ranger rose to a crouch, swaying to
the balls of his feet.

The pressure from the pipe truck in the rear
relaxed for a moment so that the station wagon was not being pushed
forward quite so fast as before, then abruptly, the pipe rig gave
them a little bump and sent the ranger flying off balance, rolling
for the front of the car, where he would land under the wheels.

He flung out a hand and clawed for the
wrecker and missed, but in his scramble he hooked one of his elbows
around the side-view mirror, his body sprawled in front of the
steering wheel.