Phantom Banjo (36 page)

In the logging truck, Lulubelle Baker
groaned, "Fuuuck, next thing you know they'll start sprinkling
friggin' holy water."

The refrigerator truck passed the van and
filled in the space vacated by the demon-driven fuel tanker. The
van drew up behind it, beside the pipe truck in back of the
besieged station wagon.

Everyone in the van was awake, watching and
listening, trying to understand what was happening. Hawkins, who
was used to feeling for minute shifts in the balance of wind, sail,
weather, and rudder, who watched and listened across the waves for
whales to be saved and for threats to them, who was used to
listening and singing above high wind, crashing waves and creaking
timbers, the thud of hand pumps and, sometimes, the drone of
engines, heard a snatch of the song from the station wagon. It
helped that he had his window rolled down and his head stuck out of
it. Even so, the only word he heard was "Char-i-o-ot."

"They're up there and they must be okay
because they're singing," Hawkins told the others, and listened
again, hearing "char-i-o-ot" the second time. For most of the
others, that word would have indicated only one song. But Hawkins
had been raised by a Jewish mother and an atheist father far from
the Bible Belt and places where black slaves had moaned gospel
songs to keep themselves going. His earliest and also his most
recent interest in music was maritime occupational songs and he
concentrated zealously on his specialty.

So when he heard the word "chariot" and the
faint, tinny ring of the banjo above the horns, he knew they'd
found Willie and the others and he leaned gladly into the fumes and
noise, and bellowed back what he thought he heard, based on his own
frame of reference.

Stomping his foot to the floorboards and
yelling the first word, as he would to cue a crew that the time had
come for the first beat, the first haul on a line, the first thrust
of a pump, he sang, "We'll roll the old chariot along, we'll roll
the old chariot along, we'll roll the old chariot along and we'll
all hang on behind."

The crew in the van were all strong singers,
knew the chantey and took it up at once, the notes and beat of the
work song, accompanied by hands beating on the van walls and feet
stomping on the floor, fighting back at the truck horns. Faron
honked back in time with the chantey.

"Oh, a vacant lane ahead wouldn't do us any
harm," Hawkins improvised to fit the situation. The song was so
often "zippered" with verses from other songs or ones made to order
on the spot that adding verses was the most traditional thing you
could do with it. And what the hell, even if they were on dry land,
this was a dirty, tired, ill-fed crew who had been keeping watches
driving for the last few days. They'd even gotten pretty wet once
or twice. Close enough for folk music. "Oh, a vacant lane ahead
wouldn't do us any harm, oh, a vacant lane ahead wouldn't do us any
harm, and we'll all hang on behind."

The refrigerator truck zoomed forward, away
from the side of the station wagon.

As the people in the van and in the station
wagon sang the first lines of the choruses together, Faron grabbed
Hawkins's arm and jerked him back inside the van. They changed
lanes and drove into the space the refrigerator van had just
vacated. The station wagon was beside them with Willie at the wheel
and Julianne singing "Char-i-o-ot . . ."

Gussie had been singing so hard it took her a
moment to realize that the horns weren't bleating as fiercely
anymore. A rush of fresh air filled the van from Willie's open
window and she hunkered down to breathe it in and saw the van, with
Hawkins leaning toward them bellowing his brains out. As soon as
they heard Hawkins clearly, everyone in the station wagon except
Juli changed songs.

Willie and Gussie both waved to Hawkins and
the ranger nodded wearily, as if the van were some story a speeder
was making up to avoid a ticket.

"Hi there, wanna drag?" Hawkins said.

"Keep singing!" Willie called back.

"Why?"

"Christ, never mind, just try 'And if we sing
a song they can't do us any harm . . .' " Willie began and the
ranger and Gussie picked it up.

* * *

The banjo changed tunes belatedly and Juli
followed suit, changing chariots in the middle of the chorus.
Lulubelle Baker was profoundly grateful. Despite the fact that TV
evangelists were some of her best people too, she could no more
abide spirituals of any kind than any other devil and it was only
her soft spot for Willie's old wild ways that kept her driving the
logging truck instead of dumping the whole load on them. The sea
chantey was better, though. Sailors were among her best people too.
Especially the old ones the songs recalled—drunken, whoring,
loutish, sometimes opium addicts, even, if she was lucky,
criminals, killing off whales and other marine life, spreading
corruption and disease among innocent island-dwellers who
previously had known nothing worse than maybe a little cannibalism.
Damn good thing the Expediency Devil was out of sight in front of
her. He would have snitched about her unprofessional attitude. Dry
stick. She didn't care. She had a good mind to let fly with the
logs, light up the fuel truck, and enjoy the bonfire. She hadn't
had so much fun in a long time.

"Oh, another little stop wouldn't do us any
harm," Willie sang and in the fuel tanker, the Expediency Devil put
on his brakes, wondering what the hell was going on back there.
Willie flung open the door of the station wagon and jumped out—and
almost fell on his face when his knees, folded for so long, refused
to straighten for a moment and he had to brace himself against the
door to stand. Gussie leaped out behind him, one hand around Juli's
wrist. The ranger was the last, half supporting Juli, who clung to
the banjo that plucked away on a melody line for the chantey all by
itself.

Hawkins yelled back and Anna Mae and Brose
flung open the van's side door to receive the refugees.

"Oh, an off ramp from this highway wouldn't
do us any harm . . ." Willie sang and halfway through the second
repetition there was a shrieking rebel yell from the direction of
the logging truck and the second chain broke, sending logs rolling
onto the station wagon, barreling across the road toward them.

The Expediency Devil, who occupied his
current position to escape the flames of hell, thank you, and who
had no wish to endure other, less metaphorical flames, caught sight
of Lulubelle's characteristically irresponsible maneuver in his
mirror and stepped on the gas, getting the hell out of there, while
Lulubelle cackled like a cartoon witch.

The road shook beneath the stampeding logs.
The fuel tanker driven by the Expediency Devil speeded away but the
second one still blocked the road ahead. Fortunately, the singers
were coming up on the chorus again and as they sang, "Roll the old
chariot along," it started rolling, barely in time for them to
drive out of the way of the logs, toward what mercifully looked
like the off ramp they'd been singing for.

As the logs boomed and bounced, the highway
trembled—and disappeared. There was no side ramp, no cloverleaf,
just a gravel road through a meadow polluted with the skeletons of
dead cars, trucks, and buses, rusting in the light rain that
started falling as if the dust of the highway's dissipation had
seeded clouds. The van clattered onto the gravel and a flying piece
pinged against the license plate and knocked loose the tiny
transmitter that had been placed there days earlier by Nicholson's
police minion at the catastrophic close to the festival. It fell
undetected to the ground. The only reaction from those on the
receiving end was relief—they didn't have to listen to all that
singing anymore and could concentrate much more on the entertaining
spectacle provided by Nicholson, the prissily indignant Expediency
Devil, and an unrepentant Lulubelle Baker who was still laughing
her head off.

"I'll be," Willie said wonderingly, and
carefully omitted the "damned" he would usually have used as part
of that exclamation. "It worked."

"Something sure did," Faron agreed.

"Don't stop singing," Willie said.

Hawkins tried one of the original verses,
about a little slug of rum wouldn't do them any harm, but no rum
materialized and Ellie said sadly that it must work only on
bedeviled highways. Nevertheless, Willie took charge of the banjo
and kept playing the same song and kept singing it until he had no
voice and then insisted that others take over. They finished the
last chorus several uneventful hours later as they pulled into
Gussie's driveway in Tacoma.

CHAPTER 17

August paused to tell everybody to drink up,
it was last call.

"Harry, can I buy you a coffee for your last
drink?"

"Nah, " Harry said. "After all that, I
believe I'll take a taxi tonight and tell it to stay off the
freeway."

"Belter yet, a bus," Lewis said.

"We'll take you with us," Vicki told him.

"Yeah," Lewis said, "wouldn’t want you picked
up by any ghostly taxi drivers."

Vicki said, "Come on, August, it's almost
closing time. How did they get the songs back and get rid of the
devils?"

'Why, child, what makes you think they got
rid of the devils?" August asked. "It's not all solved that easily,
in fact, it hasn't properly been solved from that day to this.
Still, there's a little more I can tell you now," she said.

"And you could tell us the rest tomorrow
night, " Lewis said. "Like a miniseries."

"Maybe," August said. "Actually, the end of
this is, like a lot of things in life, the beginning of the next
part. Because although the musicians got loose from the freeway
with the help of the songs and the ghosts, the problem remained
that the songs were lost and now the musicians realized they were
going to need to get those songs back for their own protection, as
well as their livelihood."

* * *

The house looked disappointingly normal to
Gussie. Her cat chewed her out in no uncertain terms, trotting
along on heavy paws and mewing up at her anxiously. The food and
water dishes were full so Gussie knew the cat was lying again about
not having been fed in weeks. The light on the answering machine
blinked furiously and the metal-made-to-look-like-wood top of the
kitchen table was piled with mail.

Nobody was the least bit interested in having
a seat but the bathroom was very popular. Gussie put the kettle on
the stove for them and broke out three-month-old cans of diet soda
from the fridge before she stroked the cat or looked at the
mail.

"I need to call my mom and dad and let them
know we're okay," Ellie told Gussie.

Gussie nodded absently.

"Hi, Dad. Yeah, we're fine. It was bizarre.
I'll tell you about it—huh?" She held the phone out. "Brose?"

"He's in the can," someone called elegantly,
and then, "Oh, no, here he comes."

Brose grunted a greeting into the phone.
"Yeah? Well, I'll be damned. No, I guess here would be best. Yeah,
a wire. Through a bank. What's your bank, Gussie?"

"Seafirst."

"Seafirst," he said. "Thanks, buddy, that may
solve a lot of things. Oh—okay," he thrust the phone back at Ellie.
"Your daddy wants to talk to you again."

"I need to call in to headquarters," the
ranger said when she was done. "Is there somewhere I can talk
private?"

She waved him into the bedroom—the cord was a
long one.

Anna Mae grabbed Willie's arm. "Now, while
he's in there, you have to escape."

"I do?" he asked.

"Yes, or they'll kill you and destroy the
banjo and . . ."

An angry exclamation came from the bedroom
and the ranger stomped out, glaring at Willie accusingly. "They
don't know who the hell you are and have no record of what you were
supposed to have done and I've been fired for overstaying my annual
leave."

"I wish I could say I'm sorry about that,
officer," Willie said. "But you understand—I do have a question
though."

"Yeah?"

"If I don't have to call you officer anymore
what do I call you?"

"Unemployed, mostly. My name's Bud Lamprey.
You got a beer, lady?" he asked Gussie.

She waved him toward the refrigerator and
punched the phone machine button.

Craig Lee's voice was the first one on her
recorder. "Gussie, call my house ASAP," it said, but there was no
mention of time or date.

She heard four rings and was expecting his
answering service when a timid female voice said, "Hello?"

"I have a message to call Craig," Gussie
said.

"Mama?"

"Lettie?"

"Mama, you're back. We've been so
worried."

" You’ve been worried! Who slipped you the
file in the cake is what I want to know."

"That woman lawyer you hired, she got us off.
Proved that the customs official was crooked and made a deal with
them to let us go with clean records—"

"What woman lawyer?"

"You know, Ms. Burns, the red-haired one. She
was real good, even though Mic kept sayin' he thought she was on
somethin'. But she hadn't been there but about a half an hour and
they let us go, just like that. Drove like a maniac, and I didn't
appreciate the way she propositioned us but some people are a
little weird, I guess."

"The important thing is that you're free,
darlin'. I'm home. Can I come and get you?"

"Well, no, we're kind of house-sitting for
Craig. He was in an accident with a friend and she was hurt real
bad. He broke a hip and his hands got all cut up."

"I wish that surprised me," Gussie said
sadly.

"What?"

"Never mind, darlin'. I got a houseful of
company here right now so if you can come on over for a while I
just need to see you."