CHAPTER 8

 

A kid stood loitering by the fence post where the corduroy road turned off from the county road to Brose's place. The kid had a shaved head with some kind of drawing on it, and wore jeans with no shirt or shoes.

Brose leaned out the window. "Hey, Morris, what's goin' on? Need a lift?"

"Oh, I coulda got me a lift, okay. In a cop car. Just thought you might like to know, my man, that the heat's down at your place. Somethin' about a horse and some dude who—" He peered around at Willie. "Uh—just thought you needed to know."

Brose picked up the pistol Willie had brought with him and began inspecting it while he thought. "You come down here alone?" he asked Morris.

"Naw, me and Bubba and Joe-Ed got a ride from South Congress, thought we'd come see you just for the hell of it."

"You know the drill. Where the feed is, the medicine. Me'n Willie gotta go do something. You guys stick around and take care of the critters?"

"Well, sure but . . ."

"Don't eat everything in the fridge and be sure and belt the damned thing back up, okay?"

"Okay."

"You got any money on you?"

"Some."

"How much?"

"Angie's new squeeze laid fifty on me to get lost."

"Lay it on me and get lost here."

"Rent?"

"A loan. Snot-nose kid like you don't need fifty dollareses nohow."

Willie had been quiet through all of this. Brose looked back and in the shadow of the cab saw Willie's eyes flicker, shining like those of a cornered fox. He caught Brose's glance and rubbed his jaw with one hand. "Sorry to drag you into this, pal. Fact of the matter is, though, I'm not sure how I got into it.. Or what it is. I cannot believe the police saw that wreck and saw Mark's body and assumed I had something to do with his death. What the hell do they think I did, pulled him out of the wreck, then bopped him with a blunt object? Why? I mean, maybe that rattler was right and givin' him a drink wasn't exactly recommended in the first-aid book but hell, I didn't know nothin' about it and I sure didn't know he was so bad hurt. Besides, I just poured the stuff for him, not down him."

Brose nodded and didn't say anything more until they were halfway across East Texas. Part of the reason he didn't was that Willie had gone back to sleep, his chin sinking into his chest until he caught himself suddenly and threw his head back, snorting, where it lolled against the back of the seat. Brose kept the CB tuned to the police channels but heard nothing. They hadn't exactly talked about where they were going but Baltimore seemed as good a place as any. Brose knew a woman who might help them out. Willie no doubt knew several more. The important thing was to get there in one piece. People had gotten killed coming and going to festivals a lot these days. That's what this one seemed to be all about.

He took the back roads and drove throughout the night, then woke Willie up.

"Let's pull into an all-night grocery someplace before you go to sleep," Willie suggested. "Get us some coffee. In case they have my picture on TV. Shit, when I think of all the times I wanted my picture on TV and then to get it this way. Hell of a time to suddenly get photogenic."

They sat in the truck and drank the first cup of coffee before Brose returned to the store for a second cup, which he handed to Willie. "Thanks, buddy. No more for you?"

"I'm goin' to sleep. 'Sides, that shit's bad for your blood pressure, or ain't you gettin' old like the rest of us?"

"Older by the minute," he said. "You got any tapes in here?"

"Glove box."

"Bother you if I play one?"

"Nope."

He popped a tape into the player. It got halfway through the first number before the singer's voice deepened and slurred. Brose tried to pop it but it wouldn't budge. When it finally did, tape looped across his hand in a bright brown ribbon. He threw it on the floor and kept driving.

They changed places many more times before hitting the outskirts of Baltimore two days later, somewhere around four in the morning, when they saw the hitchhiker.

Willie's first impulse was to stop and pick up the wet, weary-looking woman. His second impulse was to forget it. He did not really believe Mark was dead, though he had seen the body, seen the wreck. He did not really believe a rattlesnake had accused him of murder and an ornery horse had carried him to meet a whore who was apparently part of some grand conspiracy. He did not honestly believe his problem with the police was anything that couldn't be cleared up by knowing the right people or that Lenny would be even angry enough to fire him once he understood that none of it had been his own fault, that all this stuff just seemed to happen—if it had happened, and if it hadn't, there was nothing to explain, was there? Except how was he out here on the road to Baltimore with a man he hadn't seen in three years, a banjo, a gun, and a collection of broken Styrofoam coffee cups and paper nacho trays? Whatever was going on, dream or real, he wasn't entirely sure he was ready for the next installment.

But the headlight beam threw into harsh relief the drooping blond head and the shoulders slumped under the weight of a backpack. And as he drove a little ways past, he thought there was something familiar about the woman, which, considering the number of women he'd known at one time or another, wasn't too unlikely. So he pulled over and honked. Brose roused, mumbling. In the rearview mirror Willie watched the woman's head snap up and the way she shifted the wet backpack as she broke into a run.

She slowed as she approached the car and saw the outline of the two men. Brose wasn't fully awake so Willie reached across him and opened the door, keeping the gun close, just in case.

"Hi," she said, peering in at them but backing away slightly, cautious. Brose was a pretty rough-looking character unless you happened to be an injured animal. "Where you guys headed?"

The feeling that there was something familiar about her grew stronger as Willie said, "Fredericks, Maryland, wherever the hell that may be. How about you, ma'am?" He never called women darlin' under circumstances where the lady in question might possibly suspect him of being a rapist-pervert. At least not before they'd been formally introduced.

She took two fast steps closer. "Hey, Willie? Willie MacKai? Is that you?"

"Sure is, sugar, but who's askin'?"

She was already scooting into the truck cab, butting Brose to one side. He woke up just enough to grumble and put his arm around Willie and his head on Willie's shoulder. Willie patted his shoulder absently.

"Julianne Martin. Remember, Juli and George? You told me I played the spoons like a hula dancer. I said I didn't know hula dancers played the spoons."

He remembered, vaguely. He met a lot of people, a lot of musicians. "Oh, sure, that Juli Martin. Brose, wake up. We got company. This here is Julianne Martin. Well, hi, Juli." He wasn't sure whether to ask about George or not. Maybe they'd split the sheets.

"Are you going to the memorial festival, Willie?"

"Yes, ma'am. Josh, Sam, Nedra, they were good friends of mine. Why, Sam was the man got me into singing the music of our land to begin with. And one time back in the sixties when I was playing some club in New York and some drunk charged the stage, little old Nedra Buchanan picked up a chair and brained him with it. And Josh Grisholm, ah well, God, we're all gonna miss Josh. I never heard tell of anybody could cut the bullshit artists down to size like ol' Josh could."

Juli nodded solemnly and wiped the rainwater from her face.

All of a sudden Willie wondered what the hell he thought he was doing. Was he going to try to warn these people at the festival of something some crazy whore had told him? What would he tell them, that he had seen a really wild videotape? For Christ's sake, he'd been speaking out for thirty years and nobody had listened to him, in spite of all he'd done. Why should he bother now? What did he owe these people anyway? He almost asked it out loud, asked Brose and Julianne Martin, but he hadn't had enough to drink to be that bold.

"Wow, this is really incredible," Juli said, chasing off the uneasy silence as the headlights chased the tufts of mist. "George and Lucien told me to come and now I know it was meant to be. My God, Willie MacKai. I haven't seen you since Dumas in—was it 1982?"

"That's right. You and George went on just before me. Do you mind my askin' where George is?" He thought it seemed pretty funny that George would tell his wife to go to a festival by herself even if she had to hitch across country to do it.

"You didn't hear about it, huh? About George, I mean?"

The smooth way her voice slid past her husband's name sounded sorrier to Willie than if she'd sobbed and all of a sudden he forgot about himself and his problems and said softly, "No, darlin'. I didn't hear anything. I've been out of touch. What about George?"

She told him very calmly about George being shot to death during a robbery.

"Jesus, Julianne. Darlin', that's just awful. I don't know what to say."

"Oh, it's okay now," she said. "He's doing fine on the other side and anyway, as Lucien says, we brought it on ourselves. It's just that I miss him and I miss playing music, even though I know now that that isn't my true path. But anyway, I wrote this song and both George and Lucien wanted me to come so here I am and now that I've run into you guys I know it's a sign that it was the right thing to do."

"Uh-huh," Willie said. He was watching the road closely now and preoccupied wondering if he ought not to warn her now of what he knew, so although it sunk in that something was wrong about what she was saying, he wasn't listening closely enough to know what it was. He was more worried about how crazy he'd sound and she was still young and pretty and he didn't want it to look foolish. He'd have to think how to phrase it so she'd be properly impressed and a little scared—he sure as hell didn't want to be the only one who was scared. There was also the fact that he was a wanted man and even though it was a mistake, he didn't think it was all that great an idea to go advertising it around.

"You got any idea where this shindig is being held?" he asked.

She slung her pack up in front of her and dug around. "I don't know but it looked to me like it was pretty impromptu from the flier. I never heard of the producer and she didn't say who else was coming but it might be fun anyway, like an old-fashioned sing."

The banjo faintly tinkled "There's a Meetin' Here Tonight." Juli's silhouette dipped to examine it. "For heaven's sake. I could swear that banjo played by itself."

"Just a trick of the car bumping I suppose," he said.

"Mind if I look at it?" she asked.

He shrugged.

She picked it up, watched the vibrating strings for a moment, then turned it over and examined it, as if looking for a tape recorder, thinking it was a joke or something. "This is pretty amazing," she said.

"Ain't it just?" he agreed. "Impresses the hell out of me, darlin’.”

"I can't figure out how you're doing this, Willie, and it's really fantastic the way you've fixed this thing up so it looks so much like Lazarus, Sam Hawthorne's banjo."

"Is that what he called it?"

"Urn hmm. I read all about it, how he designed the first one that you could play without retuning all the time and how Manny Golden, the head of Uprising Records, had one special made by an Appalachian instrument maker. I remember because I was in college at the time and was fascinated by folk medicine and magic and the banjo maker was supposed to be from a long line of white witches. The interviewer from the Folk Music Journal asked him if that was why he was such a good instrument maker and the guy said sure, all his instruments had a spell to them. Hey, you know, I'd always thought this little quote here, 'May the circle be unbroken,' was Hawthorne's idea, but now I wonder, maybe it's part of the spell, do you think? The whole blacklist business ruined Manny and he died in the middle of it all and Sam has never talked much about any of it."

They drove off the beltway at about nine and pulled into a service station to call the contact number. A machine answered in a woman's low, rather nasal voice and gave directions to a small farming community outside of town. The directions said which country road to turn off on, mentioning that acts should sign up by five o'clock that evening.

"It does sound pretty casual," Juli remarked doubtfully. "Not like what you're used to, Willie."

"No indeed," he said. The festival he had been associated with had had only the top names, and not enough room for all of them, with the program carefully planned out so that the most expensive performers got the best slots, exceptionally talented people without names just sitting in the audience, playing at the all-night jam sessions, and hoping to win songwriting contests. The festival got so big, just before it collapsed due to a lot of bad weather and financial overextension at the time the oil boom went bust, that his name and photo were no longer considered a big enough draw for the promotional pamphlets.

 

They took a break at the first highway rest stop. Willie and Brose stretched out under the tarp in the bed of the truck, leaving Juli curled up in the cab. Willie was dreaming:

He was at the old Flugerville Festival with its rows of crafts booths and thinking how peculiar it was that one of the booths had been let out to an Irish instrument maker. Meanwhile some hippie girl whose eyes he couldn’t see for a big hat and whose body he couldn't tell much about because she wore a loose huipil tried to sell him a doll dressed in Guatemalan handweaving. He knew it was a voodoo doll and had either a little microphone in it or some kind of drugs but since he didn't know which, he wasn’t about to buy it. The girl's eyes burned red clear through her hat brim and the guy onstage was singing Hoyt Axton 's song about the devil being a joker, lying, and in general acting like the old mule who'll be nice to you for two weeks just to get the chance to kick you. Someone was playing that one, on the banjo, and in his sleep Willie could feel his mouth moving to the music, the words slipping over his vocal chords and lifting his tongue and passing through his lips, and then he realized that he was the singer, and he was seeing the red-eyed hippie girl from onstage and her little voodoo doll was playing banjo except that the neck was strung with glittering pins and the tuning pegs were the heads of hatpins. And he heard a flapping above him and he thought, thunder, and he looked out over the audience, smiling, clapping people wearing leather bras and Mexican embroidered clothes and concho hatbands on wide straw hats, or Flugerville T-shirts or no shirts at all, all of them grinning and laughing and talking. All of them on benches around the stage except those lined up at the booths where vendors sold beer and hot dogs, barbecue ribs and sweet corn on the cob, cinnamon buns and popcorn, fajitas and nachos and soda pop. Some of the craft vendors were still doing business too, selling beaded earrings that shimmered like rainbows on waterfalls, tie-dyed shirts, Mexican and South American clothes woven in patterns of red, orange, green, purple, bright blue, birds, flowers, fish, cats, llamas. There was Indian silver work, Hopi. Navajo, concho belts, belt buckles, earrings, leatherwork, all manner of instrument makers with dulcimers and guitars inlaid with gold and pearl birds and dragons and eagles. There were songbooks and tapes, musical spoons and bones, face painters, hatters with rows of feather-banded Stetsons in felt and straw hung from hooks in pegboard, covered with awnings that flapped with the wind. Why, it wasn't thunder after all, just the awning. Because the sun was still shining bright and pretty, even though it was time for the evening show and he was it. And then there was a shadow over it and the flapping was louder and he looked up to see what looked like a silhouette of the Angel Gabriel blowing sax, accompanying the banjo, but as the angel flew closer, it grew enormous and it was still blacker than the ace of spades, its crow-black, feathered wings flapping and making a mighty breeze and he could just make out the face and it was painted up like Lulubelle Baker's.

And the banjo changed to start playing "House of the Rising Sun," and he couldn't remember the words because, of course, Sam Hawthorne had done that one once. That wasn't any angel up there, it was an angle, the Angle Gabrielle-Belle, and it was more like a cupid than an angel, a great big bare-assed cupid with a quiver on its back, except that it shot big hypodermic syringes and he knew they were full of dope and probably poisoned, like darts, with all those cruddy diseases you caught nowadays if you messed with women like Lulubelle. And she shot and he felt it hit him like a thunderbolt and thought, hell, maybe I got that Angle wrong, maybe it's Thor—shore is thore—and then it knocked him over again.

He was rolling around in the truck bed with the tarp flapping over him as Brose, who had given up sleeping in the heat that made Willie stink like a billy goat and made him sweat so bad that even his toes were sweating, put the truck in gear and jolted onto the highway.

They found the turnoff just after one o'clock. A few cars, vans, and trucks were ahead of them, but no big crowd Willie could see yet. A black-haired woman stood by a cattle gate. A sign that said “private property no trespassers” was posted on the fence beside her left leg.

"Hi," she said, leaning over to look into the truck cab.

"This the Gunn place, ma'am?" Brose asked. "Place where the music festival is this weekend?"

"You folks pickers, are you?"

"Yes, ma'am," Brose said. "I'm Brose Fairchild and these here are. . ."

Willie leaned over the rim of the truck bed, "We're Brose's Bouncin' Balkan Band, ma'am. And who might you be?"

"I'm Anna Mae Gunn. This is my place. I've heard of you, Brose, from the old times when you played blues with some South Texas cowboy, but I hadn't heard about your band."

She nodded curtly at Juli and Willie. She didn't look thrilled to see any of them. Her eyes were narrow under heavy black brows, her nose hawkish, and in a rounded face her mouth was thin, bitter-looking. Funny woman to be having a festival. But then, this was a memorial festival. Maybe she had a talent for grieving. "Go ahead on in, and welcome," she said formally, straightening up. "I'm just screening people right now. Set up your camp somewhere outside the bleachers. There are some fire pits dug for cooking already. Sylvia Bemis will sign you up for a spot tonight."

"Many other acts come through?" Willie asked.

"Check with Sylvia," she said abruptly, and swung the gate open for them.

They drove through it, and Anna Mae waved them down again. "Just one thing," she said. "We'll be bringing supplies in but we'd just as soon once you get here you stay here. I guess I can have on my property who I want and I'm not expecting a large crowd, but this is by invitation. I don't want strangers following you back to see what the traffic is all about."

Willie thought this was a peculiar way to run an entertainment business, but when he caught her eye for a moment, he realized she looked like he felt, spooked. She broke eye contact and she turned on her heel to greet another car.

The stage was the patio deck of a farmhouse, with logs and a few pieces of lawn furniture set all along the driveway. The side pastures had been cleared of whatever stock might be kept there and several vans, tents, and pickups with campers on the back were parked there instead. Rent-a-privies were lined up between the camping area and the audience seating.

Brose parked near a fire pit. "That thing ain't going to do us a lot of good," Willie remarked, gesturing at the fire pit. "I hate to say it, buddy, but except for this here package of Oreos and half a paper plate of cold nachos, we ain't got a whole hell of a lot of stuff to camp with." Normally, he would have been touchy about the Gunn woman's admonition against leaving the site, but under the circumstances, he didn't blame her. He figured the same thing was on her mind as his. Well, maybe not Lulubelle, but some of the things he'd learned from her seemed to have occurred to Gunn.

Since they were early, they captured one of the best spots, with a tree and a little brush for shade and privacy. Brose picked it out, figuring they could sleep the same way they had on the way over. Willie didn't mind living rough, but he wasn't real used to doing it before he was going to perform.

Cars kept rolling in beside them and parking, and for a while they talked sleepily and watched who was coming. Then Willie said, "Well, friends, since there ain't no camp to set up and no coffee to brew, I reckon I'll catch up on some more of that napping. Seems to be the best thing going." He stretched out in the cab and Brose and Juli retired to the truck bed this time.

Sometime later, he awakened to the tickle of fur on his outstretched bare arm, brush, brush, pause, brush, and opened one eye to stare into that of an orange cat that perched with all four paws on the sill of the truck-cab window, the tail flicking softly against him as the cat tried to decide if there was room enough for them both in there. He was fully prepared to wallop the beast if it started talking to him but it looked down at him as if he were so completely out of its class it wouldn't bother if it could. Watching it, he became conscious of the sound of guitars and banjos being tuned, voices raised in greeting, song, argument, and sales pitch.

"It takes a worried man to sing a worried song . . ." some obviously worried man sang.

"Only a nitwit would credit the Lomaxes with that song. Frank Warner got that song from Yankee John Galusha in the forties ..."

"Who gives a shit about that old stuff that's been done over and over anyway? You gotta add something new . . ."

"Have a beer?"

"Stop border harassment!" A wide West Texas voice brayed, "Free the Chaveses! Yes, sir, sign right here. What's it about? I'll tell you what it's about, mister. It's about the goddamn feds lockin' up my little girl and her husband and a better man never lived than our Mic, let me tell you, just because they gave a friend a ride."

"Whoa!" Willie came awake and opened the cab door so fast the cat had no time to vacate before he swung it wide and jumped to the ground, right into the leavings of the last tenant of the pasture.

He looked around at the gathered instruments, the musicians talking, tuning, necking, and generally hanging out. A tiny woman with a frizz of gray hair and shapely tanned legs sticking out of khaki shorts was handing fliers to passersby, gesturing with the papers when she wasn't waving them in the face of a bare-chested biker type.

"Sounds to me, woman, like you are bad-mouthin' our northernmost neighbors," the man said between belligerent pops of bubble gum.

"No, you asshole, not the Canadian feds, our feds. Oh, the Canadians do it too, the other way around, but our damn fool government started it. Claimed it was for drugs. Well, I'm here to tell you my Lettie nor my Mic never did so much as a teeny little pointy leaf of marijuana a day in their lives. Why, you should have heard Lettie when she caught me smoking with that no-account Harold Beconovich in the parking lot outside the Bide-a-wee Motel . . . what the Sam He. . ."

"Augusta Turner, you delicious little morsel of feisty female, it really is you!" Willie exclaimed, picking the woman up, locking his arms around the Flugerville Folk Festival logo that engulfed most of her torso, and whirling her around two or three times.

She broke loose from him long enough to twist in his arms and give him an enthusiastic bear hug, "Willie MacKai! As I live and breathe! I might have knowed you'd be here." The wind tore the papers from her hands. "Damn! Help me catch these things, Willie. Won't do to go litterin' Miz Gunn's pasture."

He helped. The papers flipped up against tents and legs, slid under cars, and plastered themselves onto trees. "What's all this about now, Gussie?" he called to her across two jam sessions and a tarot reading. "What's this about Lettie and Mic?"

She snatched up the last errant paper they had any hope of catching and slumped down against a tree. He flopped down beside her. "Busted for smuggling drugs, of all things. Can you believe it?"

"I'm sad to say that of a large percentage of my acquaintance, yes, ma'am, I could believe it, but Lettie and Mic? No way. Who was this friend? Maybe he carried them in."

"That's what the feds claimed but, Willie, it was Hy MacDonald, this Scotch singer who's a friend of theirs. The customs people didn't do nothin' to Hy but send him back to Scotland but they locked up my children pending trial by a federal judge and I am not a rich woman, Willie, and I do not have the money to bail them out. And anyway, Hy MacDonald has written to me and to friends of mine and says it was absolutely a frame. He says he had nary a thing on him, not even a bottle, and yet they were calling him a drug runner and a political troublemaker right out there in the customs station before they'd even searched anything. Of course, I don't know the man, but I do know my Lettie and my Mic and I do know Craig Lee over at Triumph Music and he's been to Hy's house in Scotland and to hear him tell it, Hy's the goddamn deacon of the goddamn church over there and, besides, wouldn't be caught dead smokin' anything but Players and gettin' high on anything but good scotch whiskey—patriotic man, Craig says he is."

Willie could easily believe that. He had the same feelings himself. He was religious too—though he favored bourbon over scotch, he never had cared a whole lot for drugs. For all the big deal made over it during and since the sixties, marijuana was still to him what it had been as a boy raised in a Bible Belt South Texas town a spittin' distance from Mexico: weed was what kids fooled around with and the Mexicans smoked because foreigners did them things. It was nothing a grown man old enough to drink good whiskey should concern himself with. He said so.

"Well, and I wouldn't be so surprised, still and all, if it was pot they claimed to find, though Lord knows Lettie's got more sense than to take it across the border even if she did it, which she doesn't. But, Willie, it was cocaine they found. Not a lot of it. But they claimed they found it in Lettie's purse. With a copy of her catalog."

"The owner of a record distribution company is a better target than a foreign musician, huh?" he mumbled, half to himself, so that Gussie said, "Huh?"

"Look, Gussie, there's a little more to this than it looks like. As a matter of fact, I ain't in awful good graces with the law myself right now. Mark Mosby upped and died on my doorstep the other day and now they're wantin' me to assist 'em with their inquiries, which does not sound all that good, especially considerin' some of the other weird shit that's been happenin' in my immediate vicinity these days."

"That's the dumbest damn thing I ever heard tell of," she said indignantly. "Well, second dumbest. No, come to think of it, that takes the cake but both are just plain stupid to anybody that knows any of y'all, though Lord knows there've been times when I've wanted to wring Mark's neck myself, nothin' fatal you understand, just to get his attention."

"Too bad nobody's asked you to be a character witness," Willie said wryly.

She snorted disgustedly and stared at the ground. The tanned skin of her face and arms looked as fragile as a Civil War-era newspaper. She shouldn't look so damned old, he thought. Gussie was only a few years older than he was.

He stared out across the parked RV's to the next pasture. A few head of cattle stood together in one section, several horses in another. The orange cat was now on the roof of someone's camper, sunning itself. In the opposite pasture, the one on the other side of the audience area, Anna Mae Gunn directed as a truck backed up next to a big stone barbecue pit he hadn't noticed before and two men started unloading big slabs of meat. Smoke rose from the pit. Elsewhere on the grounds, a soft-drink stand had been set up and a tent that advertised homemade pies.

 

* * *

 

Brose and Juli stood talking to a woman at a card table up near the stage. Willie was suddenly worried about what they would say, worried about the banjo, worried about being there. "Say, Gus?"

"Yeah?"

"I'd be grateful if you'd keep what I told you about Mark to yourself. See, there's quite a bit more to it than that. It's kind of weird but unless I'm real mistaken, it ties in with what happened to Lettie and Mic."

"Do tell? Matter of fact, Willie, there's been a thing or two besides that happen that I'm not lettin' out for general consumption, but if you've got a minute, I'll tell you about it."

"I got all day, far as I know," he said.

"Well, then, about a month or so after the kids were arrested, I went to Spokane for a week to talk to a special lawyer Craig Lee recommended. I was wore out with worry and didn't want to hassle with the drive, so I flew out there and got a neighbor of mine to watch the house. I left my car with my girlfriend Marty. She lives over near the Sea-Tac airport, so it was no problem for her to pick me up either.

"Well, she met my plane and drove me back to her place where my car had been parked out in the street outside her house. I caught a cold in Spokane that was damn near pneumonia, complete with sore throat and laryngitis. I'd only barely been able to talk to that lawyer in squeaks and whispers and little notes all week long and couldn't hardly talk on the phone at all. I was looking forward to my bed, pettin' my cats, and readin' my mail so much it hurt. But when we got to Marty's my car wouldn't start. It had worked fine the last time Marty drove it, the way I asked her to. I thought I was sunk. It was about midnight by then, and the garages were closed, and it was raining. Marty and I stood outside trying to jump-start the damned thing from her pickup. Marty's real clever with cars, but she sure as hell couldn't get it to run so finally she gave in and called an all-night service station down on the corner. It had a garage and she thought one of those boys might know what to do and she got the boy on duty to say he'd come up and have a look.

"Well, there went all that bushwah about teenage boys and cars. That poor dumb kid couldn't figure it out any better than Marty, but he put on a good show and bulled it through. I don't think he'd have bothered on my account, but Marty's a cute little thing. You know how it is, Willie." Willie nodded. He did indeed know how it was. "Well, the kid tried rolling the car down the hill to compression start it, was what he called it I think. Damned if it didn't catch on fire just as he reached the filling station. He was a sight better with fire extinguishers than he was with cars, lucky for me, and he got the fire out, but meanwhile somebody called the cops and the fire department and they came over and did absolutely nothing but have me fill out a lot of dumb forms. So there I am with double pneumonia, a dead car that it was going to take a minimum of a week and a few hundred dollars to fix, and I'm still a good forty-five minutes from home.

"I was about near to cryin' but Marty said I should leave the car there and she'd have it towed to her favorite garage the next morning and meanwhile I could stay with her or she'd take me home. I wanted to go home so bad I could taste it, so we got back in her pickup and off we went.

"Well, it was still pourin' down rain and foggy and blacker than a banker's heart. We started jokin' about how bad things were goin' and how they couldn't get much worse, so of course they did. All of a sudden the road in front of the car blacked out and the dash went dark. The lights had gone clean out."

Willie had been pacing back and forth like a dog on a short lead, and now he stopped and looked at Gussie wide-eyed. "You mean both cars went out on the same night? Sounds to me like somebody didn't want you to get home, darlin'."

"Wait. You ain't heard nothin' yet. Marty steered us over on the shoulder and put on her blinkers. At least they still worked, thank merciful heaven. The car kept runnin' but the lights still wouldn't work. We were about to take the next exit off or try to flag somebody down when Marty remembered this mechanic she'd met while she was out dancing had a place somewhere near the Federal Way exit. He had been a pretty cute guy, lucky for us, so she had his card. Also lucky his place was real easy to find because no sooner had we pulled up in his drive than the car went dead too."

The hairs on Willie's arms were starting to stand at attention.

"Well, the fella hotwired it for us and got the lights working and stumbled off back to bed. We pulled up to my place about two in the morning.

"I was just startin' to say goodnight to Marty and thank her for all her trouble and tell her how sorry I was my bad luck seemed to be catchin' when I noticed that though my living-room light was on, the porch light was off. Marianne, my neighbor who was watchin' my house, knew I was comin' home too and had specifically told me when I called her earlier that she'd leave on the porch light. But I figured maybe the bulb had burned out or something.

"I asked Marty to spend the night, since that car of hers might break down at a less convenient place next time, so she tagged behind me into the house.

"I noticed right off that the cats weren't watching for me from the window but thought they just didn't recognize the sound of Marty's car. Then I saw that the porch door was unlocked and I remember saying to Marty that Marianne must have been in an all-fired hurry to leave. The mail was on the kitchen table, quite a pile of it, and I couldn't remember having left so much opened mail there with it, but lots of the letters were open. When I picked one up, I saw it was postmarked after I left. Also, a couple of file boxes of old papers were sitting on the kitchen counter, open. I usually keep them on the back porch, and when I looked back there, the door was ajar and there was water on the floor. I figured maybe it had rained real hard and flooded the floor, and Marianne rescued the file boxes, even though I didn't remember leaving any on the floor, to keep them from getting wet. Probably left the door open to dry it out. There was nothin' valuable back there and there was an inside lock.

"One of the cats jumped down from on top of the Frigidaire but the others all seemed to be hiding. I noticed the bedroom door was open when I came in, and that made me kind of peeved at Marianne 'cause I told her I didn't want them in there. They pee on the bed if I leave them alone too long. So I went in to see if they had and noticed that both the closet door and the window were wide open too and it was chilly and blowin' cold rain onto my bed. I knew then somebody had broke in and I called Marty in and told her. What bothered me most was that my oldest cat, Chessie, was gone too. Goddamn burglars got no consideration. Can't even close the damned window behind 'em. I swore if that little old cat was hurt I'd find whoever broke in if it was the last thing I did and wring his goddamn neck.

"Well, li'l ol’ Chessie had gone and hid under the house and the other cats came home once they heard me callin'. The cops came by for all the good they did. They asked if I had any ex-husbands or boyfriends who had it in for me, like since I work in a bar I'd hang out with that kinda sleaze-bags. I told 'em if it was that simple to figure out who broke into my house, I wouldn't have needed them. The funny part was that nothin' was gone, not a blank check or the insurance dividend check that was in all that mail. I didn't know what to think, Willie."

"Some kid, maybe?" Willie offered, though he didn't think all the other trouble she'd had was coincidence.

She shook her head. "Nope, and I don't think it was one of the sex nuts who get their kicks out of invadin' somebody else's privacy either, like the cops thought. Because about a week later, I went to play one of the tapes in my car, and it snarled all up in the player. I got out the album. I always tape my albums for the car, you know. Anyway, it was scratched clear across both sides. And, Willie?"

"Huh?"

"So were all the others. And all of my other tapes did the same as the one in the car, just snarled right up. I tried to play them on the way out here and they were useless. They did somethin' to the CD's I had from my last birthday too. They won't play any more than the others. Not even your albums, Willie. That's one reason I decided to come out here and campaign for Mic and Lettie. I haven't heard any good music in weeks. You know all the radio shows they used to have with folk music had to go off the air. But I can't imagine why that thief would ruin my record collection and not take anything. Why, a customer of mine that works at Boeing says they're developing some new space technology that needs scrap vinyl. They're payin' pretty good prices for it and Bill, that's my customer, has been raiding garage sales for old records. So I'm surprised the burglar didn't just take 'em."

She huffed to a stop and Willie said, "Maybe you can sell the wrecked ones and get a little money that way, Gus."

"I don't want their damned money. I want my records to play like they're damned well supposed to and I want my kids back."

Willie tried to make light of the whole thing. He didn't want her to be as scared as he was. "Know what I think, Gus?" he asked. "I think you missed your chance to be a radical in the sixties and are now atoning for very sensibly votin' Republican by becomin' a full-blown hippie now that you're old enough to do what you want."

"Well, apparently that's what somebody else thinks too, but I'm not any different than I ever was and I did not vote Republican, you cute little fascist you. I could understand it if I was some kind of radical, but even if I was Abbie Hoffman come back from the grave I don't see why the federal boys would be so spiteful as to ruin my record collection. And I'm not Abbie Hoffman, I'm just Lettie's mama and they can't hold that against me. Of course, I'm tryin' to get her out of the hoosegow. What mother wouldn't?"

When he didn't say anything for a long time, Gussie asked him, "Well, Willie, what do you think? Does this have anything to do with what you were talkin' about?"

"Maybe so, maybe not. I think so. But I got to work it through a little more before I tell you about it, darlin'. As for you, I think you'd be best off keepin' your mouth shut and your eyes open and see which way the wind blows."

He was so serious and worried-sounding it scared her a little, though not enough, of course, to keep her mouth shut. If somebody, anybody, was out to get her or hers she would by God go down kicking and screaming with all her might and they would know they'd been in a hell of a fight. Nevertheless, for Willie's sake, she nodded and said, "That's what I'm here for."

 

* * *

 

Tony went into a coughing spasm and Kathie Jorgensen stopped staring at the stain on the mattress of the cot her strange new boarder had been leaning against while she told her story. "This Gussie you're talking about," Kathie said, her voice quiet and deliberate, as if she was trying to piece something together. "That's you, isn't it?"

Gussie made a face and shook her head. "Not exactly. Not anymore." She shifted position, stretching her noodle-numb legs in front of her and bouncing them up and down until tattoo needles began stinging them.

Kathy started to ask another question but noticed the way the other boarders were turning away, almost as if they were embarrassed. When you got an evasive answer about somebody's identity, it was against street etiquette to pursue the subject. But Kathie didn't live on the street and she had the feeling this story concerned her in a personal kind of way. "You knew all these people then, really?"

"Sure did."

"And these people you 're calling devils?" Kathie asked.

"That's what I call 'em, " Gussie said. "You got to make your own mind up about some things, honey."

"Well, what I don't get," Pete said querulously, "is how come if you were just you, in one little place, how come you know so blasted much about what everyone else was thinkin' and sayin' where you weren't?"

"Hey, don't get your bowels in an uproar, kiddo. It's just a story. I learned it this way, from the people who told it to me. If I want to say I'm one of the people in it, what's it to you? But I got to tell all the parts or it ain’t no fun. And like I say, I ain't exactly the same woman now as I was then. So I switch off like, like they do on TV, so's you 'll get all the important parts."

Crazy Ruthie hit him with the end of the dog lead she wore around her waist when her dogs were staying the night at the costume shop. "Yeah, let 'er tell it her way. Just like on TV. God, it's been years since I had one of them. Go on, lady, then what happened?"

 

* * *

 

When everybody had finished registering and was milling around the stage, somebody came out and messed with the microphone, then the Indian-looking woman stepped onto the patio-deck stage and introduced herself, saying, "Welcome to my place and to this gathering. I'm called Anna Mae Gunn. I advertised this gathering as the Maryland Memorial Folk Festival for all the great ones we've recently lost from our ranks, Sam Hawthorne, Josh Grisholm, Nedra Buchanan, and so many others, all the departed spirits who left their immortality on disk, tape, and record at the Library of Congress Folk Music Archives, now gone. Festival doesn't seem quite the word. Your names have been chosen from the charter lists of other festivals. Most of you are musicians, a few are collectors, friends of the music, distributors, but by and large we have invited no audience, no reviewers, or other members of the press.

"Maybe a better word for this gathering is a ceremonial of the sort some of you will be familiar with as an Irish wake. For me, I think of it more as something that cousins of my mother's people, the Athabaskan Indians of central Alaska do, called a Stick Dance, where two villages get together and sing and dance their folks up over the top, to the good place where spirits come to rest. I have reason to feel that with all that's been happening lately, the people we've lost need the comfort of our support.

"We who do this music, who love this music, come from all over, we travel all over. Despite a lot of stuff that's been happening to try to keep us in our place lately, musicians, especially those who carry the songs of the people, have always wandered—maybe just from one encampment to the next, from one holler to the next, from one town to the next, one castle to the next and back again, bringing news, telling stories. But somehow, with all that wandering, we seem to disconnect from home folks and attach to one another, even at distances, as a large, spread-out, sometimes loving, sometimes brawling tribe. Sort of gypsies without the benefit of a specific ethnic minority heritage to make us worth being studied by cultural anthropologists with government grants.

"But as a tribe, as a profession, as a group of people who share the bond of our music, we have suffered the loss of many of our leaders, our best spokespeople, our chiefs. I welcome you and offer my place as a place for our tribe's Stick Dance, our tribute to our dead by joining our songs to their spirits as they seek their rest from this life.

"One more thing, then I'll hush and let the music start. As many of you may know about us Indian people, when we have a ceremonial feast, which this is, it is a free demonstration of hospitality. The meat, the corn, potatoes, and water are on me. Other folks with the facilities have brought pop and beer and other things to snack on. Proceeds from the pies back there go to help out the families of our friends. They made big money according to our standards, but most of them still couldn't afford health insurance. And well, I can't either. I don't want you to come on my property as my guest to sing at this do and go hungry, so help yourself to the food, but please remember I'm only half Indian. The Scottish part of me won't be at all offended if you have something extra you want to drop in the coffee can to cover the costs. Thanks."

The first act was a jug band composed of jug, washboard, musical saw, kazoo, banjo, and a fellow who played a Coleman stove with a salad fork and promised to play a ladder the following day. They made a lot of racket that sounded a lot like "When the Saints Go Marching In," in the spirit of the Indian feast.

Then there was the gray-bearded man with his hair parted in the middle who stood up and sang a cappella sea chanteys, as well as a couple more with the help of a concertina. Gussie stuffed her fliers in her Mexican basket purse embroidered with the little burros and the sombreroed boys and listened to the songs with such a big grin on her face you'd have thought she'd died and gone to heaven. She didn't know any of the songs at all, and he admitted he liked to do ones he had learned from old sailors themselves or from what he called field recordings instead of copying the same old ones everybody did. But he taught them the crewmen's part, and Gussie crowed along on those choruses confident in the knowledge she'd be drowned out by people with better voices. She loved sea chanteys as only a woman who'd grown up on the prairies could. For her they were alive with romance; sea spray and rolling waves and even battling storms wearing oilskins sounded wonderful when you're baking in 110-degree heat, fighting ticks and chiggers. Her love of chanteys was one of the things that had led her to seek the job in Tacoma, where she could see Puget Sound every day. The Sound wasn't quite the ocean, but it was a damn sight closer to it than the Brazos. This chanteyman made it clear to them all though that sea chanteys were serious business and that being a sailor was just as rough and dirty a job as working an oil rig or punching cows or even waitressing, for that matter.

She felt so good singing like that. Cleared the lungs, she always felt, like her kids said yoga did.

Next up was a casually clean-cut middle-aged man who played mandolin and sang in a twangy voice odd versions of old songs she'd heard the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary and other famous groups do long ago. It took him a while to get started going good, because he flubbed the first line of the first song several times. Finally he said "damn" in a soft voice and went on to another one. Then he'd stop in the middle of a verse and seem to be disoriented for a moment, unable to remember the words. The way he sang the words, she thought he was putting on being more ignorant than he was, or making fun of people who didn't know good English, and she had about half decided she could do without him.

But then he started talking, telling about when he was a kid with parents who spent their lives collecting songs. He told of sitting in mountain cabins with his mamma and daddy and his mountain aunts and uncles, listening to them sing. Old, old people who lived in the hills with no water but who gathered family for miles around when he and his folks came to visit with their recording machines and Mamma's little notebook. He told how a lot of mountain songs really came from England, Ireland, and Scotland and how the people's speech, which he didn't imitate when he talked, was believed by some scholars to be the same as spoken in those countries at the time the mountaineer's ancestors came over and hid themselves in the hills, isolated from outside influences. Others in the audience may have heard it before but it was all new to Gussie. The idea that "ignorant" English might be closer to the way real Englishmen spoke than the way it was taught in school intrigued her. She'd never apologize for saying "ain't" again. As if she ever had.

Four women about Lettie's age, playing guitars, base, keyboard, and a variety of percussion instruments, sang women's songs, most of them funny, one or two way too close to the bone to be funny. They had to leave the same night to return to their jobs, they said.

An angry no-longer-young man was next. He sang a lot of the old union songs and war protest songs through his nose and glared at everyone a lot and said he thought this "get 'em into heaven" stuff Anna Mae was spouting was a lot of crap but the barbecued beef smelled good.

Finally it was Brose's turn, him and Willie and that girl, Julianne Martin, Brose said her name was when he introduced her. Gussie remembered talking to her a long time ago, right before she heard about Lettie and Mic's arrest.

Sylvia, the MC, introduced the three of them as a Balkan band, but Brose pulled up a folding chair and played his old-style blues, playing faster and faster and adding more and more riffs here and there until the tune turned into a jig. He used to sing sometimes, but he didn't now.

Julianne played spoons with him. Willie didn't join in at all, but as Brose finished, Willie slid in between him and the microphone, a banjo in his hands.

The banjo seemed to be mumbling to itself even before Willie struck a chord, and he started playing the tune to "Mama Don't Allow." Julianne tick-a-tacked it on her spoons and Brose flatpicked it on guitar and Willie caught the eye of one of the jug-band members and whistled through his teeth, motioning with a jerk of his head for the band to join them.

As they stepped up, thumping and tooting along, they began to lose the melody but Willie motioned with his thumb for the sound woman to raise the volume on the instrument mike, and even with the one hand not on the banjo, the banjo relentlessly plunked out the tune. The jug band picked it up and repeated the refrain, over and over, and Willie stepped forward and opened his mouth as if about to sing, then stepped back again, shutting his lips tight and shaking his head. Stepping back up to the mike again, the banjo still ringing, he squared his shoulders and raised an admonitory finger, his voice now sounding like a preacher's or a bogus doctor in a snake-oil medicine show.