Phantom Banjo (34 page)

The truth was, she wanted the time to think.
So much had happened so fast and now that she was through reacting,
and recovering from reacting, she needed to sort it all out. She
had dealt with only a few of the most urgent loose ends involved in
uprooting her life. From just outside Maryland she had phoned a
neighbor she bought pigs from and told him she was abandoning the
farm, that if he adopted the animals for the time being, he could
keep any money he got for their sale, she wouldn't be returning. He
was good with horses so she wasn't worried about them but she did
hope the cats, especially the yellow one that hung around the
house, would take to someone new. And she hoped whoever was
hassling her friends would not include the neighbor in the
harassment. He would be safe, if her assumptions were correct. He
was so tone deaf even his hog calls were off-key.

The sleeping she had been doing hadn't been
especially restful. She kept seeing Sylvia climb into that paddy
wagon, the cops feeding instruments to the fire. Hearing a phone
ring and the voice of her boss laughing at her over the cacophony
of an amplified banjo blaring twangy noise. She searched for Sam in
the dream but couldn't find him. Coming with Brose and the others
had been stupid. Probably it was because of her that Willie, Gussie
Turner, and the banjo were missing. But in spite of her dreams, the
phone call could only have been from Sam, couldn't it?

After all, Willie had Sam's banjo and it was
the key to something. It had had power when Sam was alive—that
story about the old Appalachian witch-man instrument maker was
true. But Sam himself had had a great power, the rare power of a
man with a life and work at least largely consistent with his
ideals. And though he had never had a pretty face or even a very
good voice—these last few years as he grew older and older the
microphone had had to take up more and more slack as his range
narrowed until it was barely sufficient to carry a tune, the words
chopped in time to the beat but more spoken than sung. It didn't
matter though. The audiences didn't even need to hear him
anymore—they knew the choruses, the verses, all the songs he had
urged them to learn throughout his life. The songs had been like
oracles for her back when she barely understood any politics that
didn't directly affect her—she didn't know who the people were he
sang about, or why they were being mistreated, or why they were
brave or stupid, or why a particular thing made them happy. She
didn't understand the background of his stories or the situations
that generated them, but the songs made her curious and predisposed
her to his viewpoint. Communist propaganda the witch-hunters had
called his songs back in the fifties. And it was like propaganda in
that it was persuasive—but it differed in that it wasn't lying. Sam
sang about what he believed and whether his songs rang true or not
for some people, they were true for him. So whether the banjo had
given him power or the other way around, she wasn't sure, but
suspected it worked both ways. She wasn't surprised the power had
survived him on earth. He had always intended that his work live
past him, and since that ambition was being thwarted, she could
well imagine that bulldoggedly stubborn spirit haunting the tool
he'd used to forge his immortality and calling her long distance
just to make sure nobody missed the point. He was not one to stand
by while another—power? force? being? agency?— wiped his work from
even the memories of the people he'd touched. He wouldn't consider
being dead an excuse for slackness.

No, the banjo's power made sense to Anna Mae.
The mystery was why it should have fallen into the hands of a
confused no-account like Willie MacKai.

The road curved sharply ahead, the faint
white line seeming to vanish in the distance, but as she climbed
it, it twisted sharply to one side. She blinked and followed it.
The same thing happened twice more and she wondered where the
warning signs were that told of such curves but kept climbing. Soon
she'd be over the steepest part and going down the other side.

Suddenly as she was about to round a curve, a
white blob—no, three white blobs—rose up before her. Fortunately,
on such a road there was no way to go but slowly. At first she
thought it was a plastic bag loosed on the road or something a
truck had dropped, but then, when she tried to drive on, it swarmed
up on her and the shapes coalesced into recognizable forms—two were
broad-shouldered and bovine with horns—oxen. The other looked a
little like a Picasso version of a young girl—the features and
limbs did not seem to be put together correctly. The good half of
the face looked as if it was more afraid of the van than anybody
else could possibly be of a ghost but it also looked bound and
determined that the van was not getting past it. The arms, one
hanging lower than the other and missing its upper half, were
akimbo, the fists planted on a hip and the place where a hip should
have been. The figure was wearing an old-fashioned long dress but
it was missing in places—where the collar and the upper part of a
sleeve and half the skirt should have been was nothing but
pavement.

Anna Mae stopped the van and put on the
emergency brake. "Ellie, wake up and take the wheel," she said.

"Why? What? Oh, my God ..." she said and
then, as Anna Mae opened the door and scooted off the seat to make
room for her, "Where are you going? That's a ghost out there."

"Obviously. But the others didn't hurt us,
did they?"

"They slowed us up. Those men or whatever
they were Faron told me about must have sent them."

Anna Mae shook her head. "Maybe. Maybe not.
Take the wheel. I'm going to see what she wants."

"Okay, but what if she wants to kill us?"
Ellie said.

"Then I hope you're awfully good at driving
in reverse," Anna Mae said, and stepped onto the pavement and out
in front of the left headlight. The wind tugged at the hem of her
shorts and flapped her T-shirt around her, sent rags of her hair to
blind her. The pale figures in front of her swayed like tree
branches with the coming and going of the air currents. Why would
anyone be afraid of such anemic and insubstantial things? Anna Mae
wondered, deciding that she was not. On the Indian side of the
family, seeing visions used to be required to reach adulthood and
she supposed now she would be entitled to change her name to
Woman-Who-Saw-Three-Ghosts or something like that if everything was
still being done traditionally. On the Scottish side, a family
without a ghost or two was ancestrally impoverished. The only
spooks who scared her were those who worked for the government. If
she was haunted by Sam's ghost, the ghosts of the people in the
paddy wagon, the ghosts of the boy and girl in Arizona who had been
killed by the cops because of her own stupidity, if those ghosts
made her sweat, lose sleep, and ache with the wish to set time
backward and do things right the second time, it was because they
were her own private ghosts. This poor pale girl and those men held
no terror for her—they obviously belonged to someone else, to
another time altogether beyond her control. She did wonder why they
had been haunting the road along the van's route, though, so she
asked the wispy little apparition, "Why are you here, sister?"

The ghost didn't answer but drifted backward
a pace, oxen and all, beckoning Anna Mae to follow.

The wind gusted up again and blew shivers of
distortion through the specters of the mutilated girl and the
animals. Anna Mae took one step, and then two, and the first of the
oxen, with a lifelike scream of animal fear, slipped from sight.
Two more steps to see where he had gone and the other ox and the
girl followed. But while the ox fell slowly, screaming, the girl
drifted like dandelion fluff on the breeze, skirt belling and hair
bannering as she fell.

Anna Mae leaned forward and the ground
trembled beneath her. Her foot slipped out from under her as a
chunk of pavement broke off and plummeted toward the ghosts. She
tried to step backward but another chunk broke off beneath her
other foot and both feet flew up in the air, jerking her flip-flops
off her feet and sending them below. She flung herself backward and
held on to the pavement with her fingernails for a moment before
two pairs of hands reached down to grab her arms and drag her back
to the van.

Once inside she waited until her heartbeat
wasn't swamping the sound of the voices around her before she said,
"At least now we know what she wanted. She was a warning."

"Next time," Brose said, "I'd try to find
that out without following her back to the happy hunting grounds if
I were you."

* * *

"Who are all these tacky dead people and who
is the idiot who invited them?" the Chairdevil demanded.

"I don't know," the Expediency Devil said
peevishly. "But every time we seem to be making progress, one of
them gets in the way. It's enough to make you superstitious. Why
don't we just lead the bunch in the van in with the others since
they're so crazy about being together?"

CHAPTER 16

Julianne handed Willie back the banjo.

"That's okay, darlin', you just hang on to
it. I don't feel a whole lot like playin' now," he told her,
exaggerating his gestures so that she could make out what he was
saying by the pantomime. But she pressed it on him anyway.

"Sam wants you to have it," she said. "He's
gotten the hang of the other side now and he's of the same opinion
he was in life. He asked me to remind you that when the bastards
are out to get you there's still only one thing to do and that's to
organize. He says Joe Hill is over there with him, so you'll have
to do."

"Oh, well, if you—I mean Sam—puts it that
way," he said half mockingly, then remembered that while Julianne
might be a little on the weird and spacey side, the circumstances
in which they found themselves were not what you might call
apple-pie normal either.

As if to underline just how unusual
circumstances were, the strings began to throb beneath his fingers,
drawing them like magnets to the frets and strings that made
certain notes, certain chords. He found himself playing a
particular frailing technique he'd noticed Sam using the last time
he'd seen him. And words he had no idea he was going to say sprang
up to mate with the notes and fill in the melody.

"There's blossoms on the flowerin' tree, rich
and wine-sweet fruit

But when the branch is blighted you must
prune it to the root."

He paused between lines to say, "I'll be
damned if I'm not writin' a song. Get this down, Gussie. If
Hawthorne's ghost can make a songwriter out of me, Lord knows it
might be able to do anything—even get us out of this mess.

"Oh, the roots run deep and deep, my
dear,

They've burrowed deep and wide

All from your sunny homeland to the sea's
dark other side.

"And the sea begins a river, love, the river
starts a stream

The creek is rain and runoff from a
mountainside in spring

If the sea it should run dry, my dear, and
the riverbed should crack

Then you must find the streams, my love, and
trace their channels back.

And you must pray for rain, my dear, and you
must melt the snow

For a sea must start from somewhere for to
make its tidal flow.

"And humankind is like that sea and like that
bloomin' tree

And the songs they are its blossoms and the
waves upon its sea

That sea must not run dry, my dear, nor
rotten grow that fruit

And if you'd save the tree or sea, then take
it to its root."

He played it through twice more, the banjo
accommodatingly slowing down while Gussie scribbled the words on
the back of a ruined flier. The second time through, Julianne, who
was watching Willie's hands on the banjo, told Gussie the names of
the notes and those were added too.

"I guess that's not exactly necessary,"
Willie said. "The banjo made it up the first time. I reckon it
would remember it again."

"Maybe we should make a paper airplane out of
this and fly it out of this trap in case we're stuck here forever
so somebody else could sing it after we—you know," Gussie said.

"Yeah, I know," Willie said. His hands were
still playing the song. With effort he pulled them away. "That's
about enough out of you," he said to the fretboard. "I get the
message but there ain't a whole hell of a lot we can do about it
from here."

The ranger had stopped hyperventilating and
looked a little shame-faced. "You keep telling me it plays a song
that goes with the situation. Maybe it's trying to tell you how to
get out of this."

"I doubt that. Seems to me all that it's
saying is that to find the songs again we have to go back to where
they came from."

"Don't sound too practical to me," the ranger
said. "Who knows where that kind of thing comes from?"

"Oh, people know okay. That Randolph boy, he
knows a lot about where the songs come from. Of course, a lot of
what you hear at your folk festivals—or used to—are modern songs
made up by people, though there's still some that like the old
ballads. And then there's your ethnic songs and your work songs
that were made up by somebody fairly recently but it sort of got
forgotten who did it. Lot of songs got made up by people who were
in a certain situation or heard about one that seemed worth making
a song about. Naw, it ain't all that hard to figure out where they
come from. I just can't tell what difference it's going to make to
us right now. Unless . . ." He frowned at the banjo. "Well, hell, I
don't know any songs about bein' in our particular situation. I
don't suppose you're plannin' on inspirin' another one, are you?"
he asked it. The banjo strings stirred with the melody to the last
song, a little like "Shady Grove," a little like "The Water Is
Wide," with a touch of "Darlin' Corey" thrown in.