Phantom Banjo (7 page)

This time, however, was different. Sam
Hawthorne was a legend to anyone who cared about folk music. Seeing
him perform at least once was practically compulsory.

Sam was the master of the singalong. His
specialty was rallying and inspiring people—he'd led civil rights
and antiwar marches in the sixties and nobody doubted his guts. The
man had all but been martyred by the blacklist during the McCarthy
witch-hunts. That was part of the reason Mark thought he might just
be able to stand to see Hawthorne. Nobody in their right mind could
envy a man who had been through what Sam had.

The auditorium was crowded. It had been sold
out for a week. Mark only got through because one of the security
guards was a fan of his and slipped him in.

It wasn't like he was depriving a ticket
holder of a seat. He hung out with his guard friend, watching the
river of people flow down the corridor and channel off into the
rows of the auditorium. Smoking wasn't allowed inside, and Mark had
a two-pack-a-day habit. So he had a smoke in the corridor while
watching the five-hundred-dollar hats, fringed leather halters with
beads and bosoms spilling from them, tight designer jeans,
thousand-dollar boots, college sweatshirts, jogging clothes, and
T-shirts in various colors bearing the logos of various folk
festivals, most prominently Kerrville and Dumas, file past.

As soon as people had settled with a sigh of
clothing and a thump of chairs, feet, and bodies, Hawthorne loped
on stage, his banjo dangling from one improbably large paw, the
expression on his face a far cry from his trademark
half-neighborly, half-fatherly smile. Without looking at the
audience, he began frailing his banjo. It was an old tune—which
tune? Dammit, Mark knew. He didn't do a lot of traditional music
himself but he had heard other people play it hundreds of
times—

Turning onto the county road that led to the
ranch, Mark remembered. It had been another Woody Guthrie song, "I
Ain't Got No Home."

But Sam didn't sing. He played a couple of
lines on the banjo, then began talking. "You know, I don't always
agree with everything the government of the United States of
America does—" a big laugh from the audience at the understatement.
"But one thing they have done that I think is mighty fine is that
they have established an institution that preserves the history of
this great, though often misguided, land of ours."

Mark thought this was a very strange way to
begin a concert, and figured Hawthorne was about to get preachy
again about some cause or the other. Mark really wasn't much for
causes himself and waited impatiently while Sam stared off into
space.

The banjo idly pattered away while Sam spaced
out. Mark knew that Hawthorne was pretty old, but it was sad to see
the tall, defiant figure so stooped and weary. The spot on him was
the wrong color too, because Hawthorne's skin looked gray. Feet
shuffled, people coughed and murmured, and finally somebody yelled,
"Take it, Maestro!" Sam snapped out of it with a visible shudder,
belatedly remembering his audience. His prominent Adam's apple
traveled the length of his long neck and back up to the tip of his
short gray beard. "Over the years we've all put a lot of work into
the Folk Music Archives of the Library of Congress. Dusty Barlow's
final recordings were there, as well as many the two of us did
together, as well as the work of many, many other traditional and
contemporary singers. Songs collected by Frank and Anne Warner,
Vance Randolph, Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, the Lomaxes, many
others, found a home there. The people who once sang these songs
onto the field recordings are long gone. Many of the songs have
never been collected from the recordings. Many that have been
collected and recorded by people like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, the
Seegers, Dusty Barlow, and many, many others as well as yours truly
are now out of print and have for years been unavailable anywhere
but through the Library of Congress.

"Ladies and gentlemen, just before I came on
stage I received a phone call by a friend who knew I wouldn't be
watching television right now—though some of you may have been
watching the news before the concert and know what I'm about to
say. A series of explosions started fires in the basement of the
Library of Congress buildings—the cause isn't known yet, or the
extent of the damage except that—and this is why I was
called—between the fire and the explosion and the water damage,
it's believed that the portions of the Library containing the Folk
Music Archives were totally destroyed."

More murmuring, then Sam cleared his throat
into the mike again and said, "We haven't had such a tragedy since
the War Between the States, when the North burned the historical
treasures of the South and the South did likewise, insofar as it
was able. In Europe, war upon war has destroyed thousands of the
world's most precious art treasures, libraries, historical
monuments, wiped the work and memory of generations of women and
men from the face of the earth." His voice broke again and he
brought his hand to his throat and dropped it again. "The Library
of Congress always reminds me a little of some great cathedral of
learning—the ceilings are painted and the doorways are gilt and the
entry hall is big enough to have great fancy-dress balls in. The
Folk Music Archives wasn't in a big fancy room with gilt on the
doors. Most of it was stored in little bunches throughout the
basement. The public part was also in the basement, a couple of
little cubbyhole rooms tucked away in a corner so remote you almost
need a road map to find it. It was crammed with books and tapes and
some electronic equipment so old it probably had a certain antique
value. The most valuable thing, however, was of course the rare and
priceless songs it contained."

After another pause, he continued, "But I
want to say, on the hopeful side, that many people still know a lot
of the songs, and furthermore, that there are fine writers of songs
who are giving us new ones all the time. Right now, I can't think
of any songs about fires, but I would like you all to sing with me
a song about a flood written by a young man named Bill Staines.
It's called 'Louisiana Storm.'"

He plucked the banjo with deceptive
simplicity—his was the book and record on banjo playing from which
most of the other pickers in the business had learned. The tune was
oddly upbeat for a disaster song, and Mark thought Sam might be
using it to bring himself and the audience back to a more positive
state of mind from which the concert could continue. Sam gave
particular emphasis to the verse, "If I ever live to be a
hundred/One thing I will remember well/That one time in my life/
Well, I seen enough water/To put out all of the fires in hell," and
the audience, or those of them who understood what he was talking
about, sat silently until then, but as his voice began to crack
they sang with the determination of protest marchers, "Let the sun
shine down/Down on Lou'siana. Let the sun shine down/Let it dry up
all of the rain." The guard was singing along and Mark joined in,
full voice, his rich baritone carrying over the other unamplified
voices, turning a few heads his way.

The audience's singing visibly buoyed Sam and
his spine straightened, a ghost of the familiar grin touching the
corners of his open mouth. Every other strum or so his fingers
flicked the banjo head so that it sounded like the drum in a
marching band. "Again!" he called out, and bellowed the chorus once
more, throwing his head back and lifting his voice so it sailed
over the heads of the crowd. His Ichabod Crane body bent slightly
backward, as if to gather the emotion he wanted in the song and
hurl it through the microphone.

For a moment Hawthorne was ageless, and Mark
was conscious only of the ropes of sinew standing out in the strong
forearms that had relentlessly plucked tunes from the banjo in his
hands for the last fifty-five years. But Hawthorne was in his
mid-seventies. A large part of his life's work had just been
destroyed.

Sam's strong old heart had survived blows as
hard in the past, but in the past, the heart was younger.

Mark didn't think about how much Sam was
sweating at first. Even with air-conditioning, Austin in midsummer
was hot, and with stage lights, it was a wonder smoke wasn't
rolling out of Sam's ears. And when the old man stopped singing on
the fourth repeat chorus, Mark assumed it was to make the audience
sing louder. But when Sam stopped playing, and grabbed his left
shoulder with his right hand and held on to the mike with his left
hand, Mark dropped his cigarette.

Hawthorne gasped once and tried to pull the
banjo off his neck but instead fell forward, banjo, mike and all.
People rose from their seats to stare and someone, presumably the
concert producer, ran onto the stage and shouted for a doctor, but
no one came forward immediately.

Meanwhile, Mark, who had had life-saving
training as a swimming instructor, was already halfway to the
stage. He almost crashed head-on into a youngish man from the other
side of the auditorium. "You an MD?" the man asked. Mark shook his
head.

"I am," the man said, and turned Sam over
roughly, pulled the banjo off over his head, kicked the microphone
out of the way, and shoved the banjo toward Mark. Mark stood there
holding it while three RN's and a medtech who had just fought their
way forward from the bar in the back of the auditorium joined the
doctor. The four of them took turns breathing into lungs that had
once filled union halls and schoolrooms with unamplified song.

Mark was still standing holding the banjo
when the ambulance crew arrived. The doctor meanwhile slugged
Hawthorne in the chest in a way that would have excited the envy of
many a mine boss, bigot, and FBI man. The emergency medtechs
brought the portable defibrillator and zapped Sam right there on
the stage. In between zaps they started IV's and loaded Sam onto
the stretcher, wheeling him out the door.

Mark looked after them, long after the crowd
surging toward the door obscured his view. Someone screamed and he
realized suddenly that sounds had not been registering for some
time. As abruptly as if the volume on a television had been turned
up, he heard the sobs, the shrill questions, the shouted demands
for information. A brawny kid in a "Hook 'em Horns" T-shirt was
arguing loudly with Mark's security guard friend. It sounded like
he wanted his money back.

The hall emptied and the parking lot roared
with the sound of departing cars. Mark walked out into the heat. It
was eight o'clock and still broad daylight.

The car was stifling hot and Mark couldn't
get out of the parking lot for forty-five minutes. Vehicles sat
idling in both lanes of the access road, out onto the four lanes of
highway and beyond. By the time he had crept through that to reach
the only hospital in Austin with an emergency room and found a
parking place, it was almost ten o'clock. Time for Hawthorne's
concert, had it not been aborted, to end.

* * *

Some time ago Mark had turned off onto the
ranch road, a well-packed gravel and tar affair now squishy with
the heat. Though it was nearly seven p.m. now, the sun still shone
and Mark still drove with the windows open. Air-conditioning
clogged his sinuses.

He saw the longhorn in plenty of time. He
just figured it would be used to traffic on a ranch road and have
sense enough to lope away.

He thought that because he'd been raised in
Houston and knew of the contrariness of longhorns only from
hearsay.

He was only doing about forty miles an hour
anyway and saw no need to slow down as he drew even with the beast.
What he hadn't noticed, in his preoccupation, was that the longhorn
trotted closer to the road as he approached. Just as he should have
been past it, it was in front of him.

The last thing he saw were beady little red
eyes glaring meanly through the windshield as he pulled hard left
on the steering wheel and felt the van hit what felt like a ski
jump. He was thrown against the open window, and a spike of
blinding pain sent him spinning down a long tunnel of pulsing black
light. As he fell, the strains of "Ride Around, Little Dogie"
sprinkled after him.

* * *

Willie poured another drink and was
three quarters of the way through
The
Comancheros
when someone knocked on his door. "Señor
MacKai," a soft, slightly accented voice said from outside the
door. Willie padded over to it and opened the inner door, leaving
the screen closed to keep the flies out.

"What's on your mind, Benito?" he asked. The
kid was about eleven years old and looked up to Willie as he would
look up to a black sheep uncle. Willie was used to being idolized
and normally encouraged it. Tonight, while he was feeling about as
worthless as tits on a boar hog, starry eyes just made him
tired.

The boy had other things on his mind than
worship, however. Panting with excitement he said, "Señor, I am out
exercising the horse Mosquito, you know? And I hear a noise like
thunder, three claps, very loud. Maybe a big gun firing, do you
think? And now, you smell? A fire, no?"

Willie sniffed the wind like a wolf scenting
prey. An oily, acrid, smoky smell stung his nostrils. He wet a
forefinger, held it up. Wind was from the south. What there was of
it. Which fortunately wasn't much. Pausing only to shove flip-flops
onto his feet and throw a gun into the Jeep, he grabbed his drink
and roared off down the southbound road. Probably just wetbacks
burning old tires or something but even so, you had to check. He
hadn't looked at his watch when Mosby called, but he'd watched two
movies since then so it must have been at least three hours ago.
His head was still fuzzy from the booze, but cleared rapidly with
the combination of pumping adrenaline and the evening air.