Phantom Banjo (35 page)

"There's lots of truckin' songs in country
and western but I don't suppose that would work," the ranger said a
little snidely.

"Nah, if anyone under the age of forty-five
has heard them on AM radio they can't be folk songs," Willie said.
"Too popular, make too much money. Besides, I can't think of one of
those either that has this particular kind of truck stop in it, can
you?"

"Maybe it doesn't have to have trucks,"
Gussie said. "Maybe it's just something that relates. I keep
thinking of a children's song, what's it part of? Something about
Fiddle in the middle and I can't get around—"

Willie sighed. " 'Skip to My Lou,' I think,
or maybe it's 'Hello, Susan Brown,' but it don't do us a damn bit
of good. We already know we got a fiddle, or a banjo, anyway, in
the middle and we can't get around . . ."

He no longer felt dazed and philosophical. He
was thirsty and his throat hurt so he was pretty sure he wasn't
dead. His body hurt all over from the need to stretch out—being
folded up for miles on end, especially the same miles on end, was
putting cramps in worse than just his style. In a half an hour, an
hour, any singing that got done would have to be done by the banjo
alone because he, for one, would no longer be able to sing. Of
course, he didn't exactly have to worry about losing his voice for
his next engagement and he'd keep croaking something as long as he
could, if only he could think of the right thing to croak. The
banjo was oddly un-forthcoming—it pretty much had a mind of its own
and that mind wasn't on the problem. When he thought back on it, it
had played warnings and pointed out an existing situation, never a
song to counter what was happening.

"How about 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken'?"
Gussie suggested.

"How's it go?"

"I don't know the tune but it's something
like, 'Will the circle be unbroken, be unbroken, be unbroken, be
unbroken, be unbroken be unbroken be unbroken . . .'"

"You keep that up it's never going to be
unbroken," Willie said.

"Well, if you're so goddamn smart, you think
of something," she said.

"
I
didn't get us into this mess," he pointed out.

"Is that so?"

"Aw, both of you shut up," the ranger said.
"That thing is playin' something again. Don't you think you oughta
listen?"

Gussie, still half-peeved but beginning to be
ashamed of herself for squabbling like a two-year-old, broke off
and cocked an ear.

Willie tried to catch the words to the
slippery tune, "Da da da da da old grey horse and somethin' else a
muley and somethin' and da da da I'm goin' home to Juli . . . oh, I
get it." With considerable relief, he handed the banjo back to
Julianne. "It's for you this time," he said.

* * *

The song pierced the receiver on Nicholson's
desk, all but scaring the devils so that they scattered away from
the boardroom.

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

Lulubelle Baker shuddered painfully as
Willie's voice finished the song. The others sat by in stunned
silence as the conversation in the station wagon was broadcast
throughout the room.

"It doesn't matter anyway," the Ignorance and
Stupidity Devil said when he recovered, which was sooner than the
others since his specialty gave him the advantage of imperviousness
to any stimulus more subtle than a solid blow with a blunt
instrument. "We've got 'em good now. They're damned and all the
caterwauling in the world ain't gonna change it. Right, boss?"

He was rewarded with a hound-of-hell snarl,
followed by Nicholson's even more terrifying voice of sweet reason.
"Your world view is far too simplistic, Stu. Nothing is ever as cut
and dried, as black and white, as settled, as you seem to think it
is. If all the caterwauling in the world didn't make any
difference, we wouldn't be bothering with these nonentities, would
we?"

The Expediency Devil, a devil of action who
felt that the situation had deteriorated beyond the power of mere
bickering to solve, snapped his fingers and transported himself to
the cab of one of the fuel tankers.

With a furtive look at the rest of the
committee, Lulubelle Baker left her image lolling in the hot tub
looking high and depressed at the same time, snapped her fingers,
and popped out of the boardroom and into the logging truck. She
wanted to keep an eye on things personally and the music didn't
bother her as much as it did the others. After all, hadn't wine,
women, and song been her stock in trade for millennia?

* * *

The banjo changed tunes as Willie slid it
into Juli's hands, but the music was lost in an eruption of noise.
The vehicles surrounding the station wagon blatted their horns as
relentlessly as if every single driver had died over the wheel.

* * *

Back on good road in broad daylight in dry
weather between La Grande and Pendleton, Oregon, the road, the day,
and the place seemed so normal nobody would have thought much could
go wrong. It had seemed that way a lot of times before, Faron
reflected, and he kept his eyes peeled and his senses razor-sharp
and thus was, if not ready, at least not too shocked when the
Bicyclists From Hell appeared in front of the van.

There must have been upward of a hundred of
them. He saw the first one, a straggler, climbing the hill ahead of
him. Someone all in yellow, hot pink, and electric blue vinyl
riding an expensive-looking electric blue bike with more gears,
probably, than the van had. An orange flag with the number 6 flew
from the back of the bike.

He started to pass it at the crest of the
hill, but, drawing even with the bike, saw that there was a line of
others one, two, three, and even four abreast, all of them pedaling
furiously even though they were going downhill where he,
personally, would have coasted.

"Damn, will you look at that," he said to
Hawkins, who was reading a second-hand novel about Horatio
Hornblower he had picked up in a tavern where they'd stopped for
gas and to use the rest rooms. Hawkins looked up. "Looks like we've
stumbled into a marathon."

"Yeah," he said, easily passing number 66 and
number 13. He thought it was going to be a hassle passing them, but
without quite knowing how he was suddenly in the middle of them—and
then they slowed down so he was surrounded on all sides—in the
front by tightly girded shiny vinyl buns, on the sides by pumping
knees and dedicatedly lowered helmets.

Whether there were more of them or he was
just deeper into the crowd, Faron wasn't sure, but suddenly the
entire road ahead was covered with them, and on every side and
behind him were more.

"Notice something about these people?"
Hawkins asked.

"Yeah, there's a lot of them and they're all
in our way."

"No, I mean, their faces. Everyone I can see
from here has to be at least forty-five to fifty years old, maybe
sixty, and in very expensive gear. Looks like some sort of heart
association. Pedal-for-the-Pumper sort of race, what do you
think?"

"I think that looks like an exit and I'm
going to take it and lie low until they pass. We could stand to
find a gas station anyway and at the rate they're going, we'll idle
what's left in the tank away within an hour."

"Sounds like a plan," Hawkins said, and
returned to Admiral Hornblower.

But no sooner had they turned off than the
bikers began pouring after them, pedaling furiously up the ramp to
the overpass.

"Give them a chance to decide which way
they're going, then go the other way," Hawkins advised.

"Yeah, I guess there should be gas stations
on both sides. Or maybe we can sneak back down onto the
highway."

But when they reached the intersection they
could see that despite the hordes pedaling up behind them like the
Pied Piper's rats, a whole army of brightly and tightly clad bikers
covered the highway below and beyond them.

Faron feinted to the left and eleven cyclists
behind him dutifully gave left-turn signals. He wanted to change
his mind and turn right but his way was blocked then by a couple of
dozen more cyclists who had passed him on that side while he was
watching the other. So he turned left and headed down the access
road, hoping that a gas station would rear its utilitarian sign and
they could wash the van or something until the cyclists were out of
the way.

They stopped at the gas station on the left
and filled up. It was a modern one, complete with rest room, and a
talkative attendant dressed in a red coverall with a nametag
obscured by one of those have-a-nice-day smiling circles, only the
grin on this one had been stamped out a little funny and it looked
like a sneer.

"Some kind of race today, is there?" Faron
asked the man. Miraculously, none of the bicyclists seemed to have
followed them to the service station.

"Oh, my yes. Yes, indeed," the man said.
"Real pain in the neck—come in for water and air and to use the
John without spending a cent. Bunch of rich executive types from
Portland, too. They been doing marathons for one damn thing or
another all summer, or practicing for them, hogging the roads—the
Gandalara Cycle Club they call themselves."

"Sure gets in the way of thru traffic,"
Hawkins observed.

"Well," the man said and Hawkins would later
remember that it seemed to him the attendant was suppressing an
echo of the smirk he wore on his button. "There's the truck
route."

"How do we get to that?" Faron asked.

"Just follow this road. It bypasses town and
joins up with the highway several miles down the road, winds around
a little, but don't worry, just stay with it."

The van was out of sight, though surely not
out of hearing range, of the service station when the god-awful
racket began.

Brose knelt between the seats. "What now?" he
asked, having to raise his voice to be heard. "More spooks?"

"Can you turn around and go back?" Anna Mae
asked.

"And go through that again? No way," Faron
said.

"Maybe one of 'em invaded the truck route and
got creamed," Ellie suggested optimistically.

Brose grunted. "There's always hope."

But as they continued all they could see was
the back ends of six eighteen-wheelers driving in curiously tight
formation. Other than the way they were driving, and the fact that
they were honking their horns so loudly that they were surely heard
in Portland and Boise simultaneously, they seemed normal enough.
And this was the truck route, after all. And there were a couple
more trucks bearing down on the van from behind, pressing it to
join them.

Faron drove forward, barely outrunning the
refrigerator truck on his tail. Lemming-like, it started blowing
its horn along with the others, until the sound totally enveloped
them and Faron had to scream, "Hey, you think I should blow mine
too?"

Hawkins held up his book and shouted back,
"When in Rome . . ."

Faron grinned and beeped "Shave and a
Haircut," with clarity surprising in such a din that Hawkins
shouted a comment on it. "It's a perfect E," Faron said. "Everyone
else is in low A."

* * *

The banjo strings bumped against the calluses
of Julianne's hands like a cat nudging to be petted. She closed her
eyes and went into her Zen Buddhist transcendental state that
harkened back to ancient, pre-Hindu meditation forms. Relaxing into
her inner self, letting the universal consciousness and the great I
Am flow through her, she gave herself up to the flow of cosmic
oneness to allow its music to fill and envelop her and flow out
through the banjo. The strings rippled and vibrated, throbbing
beneath her fingers, and as she concentrated on the "now" state she
grew in awareness of what her fingers were doing, which notes they
were playing, what song the banjo was urging from her lips. She
sang, like one hand clapping, for to her both the sound of the
banjo and the sound of her voice were equally inaudible, and
despite her deafness to the words, the plucked notes rang out
piercingly clear and true, transcending her limitations, the car,
and the horns in a Taoist statement, pure and crystalline, "Swing
Low, Sweet Char-i-o-ot, comin' for to carry me home."

Willie had his fingers in his ears to shut
out the truck horns. Still, his grandma had seen to it that he
never missed church until he was fifteen years old and graduated
early from high school to start college, and he had no trouble
recognizing the song simply from the way Juli's fingers and mouth
moved, and her facial expression.

Nor did singing, or even playing, by Braille
alone give him much problem. Like Juli, he had sung many nights in
bars crowded with rowdy shouting drunks, video games, televised
football and fights. Shoot, compared to some of the places he'd
played, this highway was plumb peaceful.

He joined in lustily. With the two voices
joined together, Gussie could hear well enough to pretty much be
singing the same thing at the same time and so could the ranger,
who had given up on any kind of more direct action and who was not
an especially musical sort of guy but who had, after all, grown up
in the Bible Belt.

Through the broken front windshield the notes
pushed back at the cacophony of horn sound and they did not go
unnoticed.

The thing in the oil tanker that had replaced
the wrecker as their left-hand jailer writhed in agony and plunged
its foot onto the gas pedal to escape the horrible sound. It tore
an entire strip of the door from the side of Gussie's station wagon
but swerved wide of the tanker ahead, where the Expediency Devil
wished they had a real-live fuel tanker-driver minion who would not
be affected by the banjo's power and could simply drown the damned
station wagon in gasoline.