Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (11 page)

He had felt so full of purpose in Britain,
as if he could take those songs and all the new skills and all the
new knowledge he was gathering into him and come home and transmit
his feelings to everybody else. Now that he was here, that
confidence was leaking out of the cracked vessel he knew himself to
be.

Whether it was the sign advertising gas or
the sign advertising the tavern that attracted him most, he
couldn't have said, but he pulled up and filled the tank and walked
into the tavern, leaving Lazarus behind. The first thing he noticed
about the tavern was that, except for the noise of the pool table,
the voices of the customers, and the wrestling match on television,
it was quiet. No music—country, rock, or otherwise. Nobody even
singing drunk and off-key.

The customers consisted of three men bent
over a card table, a woman flirting with two men simultaneously at
the bar, and three more fellows, two old and a young one, farther
down the bar. They all looked bored out of their minds and way too
serious for a Saturday night.

The bar had a few pretensions, including a
mirror behind it, and in the mirror Willie saw the bartender, an
older woman with black penciled eyebrows etched onto her forehead
and hard eyes underneath, skin that even in that dim light looked
as if it might repel armor-piercing rockets, and a long improbably
blond ponytail curling out from one of those slug-shaped hair combs
women wore lengthwise on the backs of their heads. Her bangs were
the same blond, dingy at the roots, and had that too-short curly
look like Mamie Eisenhower's used to.

Her lipstick made him think of the
line from
The Shooting of Dan
McGrew
. "My God, how ghastly she looked in her paint,
the lady that's known as Lou." But she turned and set a drink down
in front of him.

He shook his head. "I didn't order
anything."

She jerked her thumb to the end of the bar,
where one of the older men held up a shot glass. "It's on me,
Willie. Haven't seen you around in a coon's age." Willie was too
tired to do anything but give the man a blank stare, and pretty
soon the fellow said, "You are Willie MacKai, ain't you?"

"I'm not sure if it's safe to admit it or
not, but yes, I am."

The man laughed. "What a kidder. Fellas, you
never heard nothin' till you've heard this guy perform. You playin'
around here, Willie? I used to go hear you all the time, but you
probably don't remember me. Bob Beezle? You were mostly surrounded
by females back then."

The man's question reminded Willie that
while he knew and his small group of friends knew and their network
of supporters knew that there had been a conspiracy to keep them
from performing, the general public didn't know. If Torchy had been
telling Gussie the truth, first folk music in particular and then
most kinds of music in general were just gradually withdrawn
without anybody particularly missing it. That was a depressing
thought. But at least the man who bought him a drink remembered
him, and that seemed like a good sign.

"I been on a European tour," Willie told
him. "Learned lots of new material."

"Well, how about playin' us something?" the
man asked, and to the bartender he said, "That's okay, right,
Simone?"

"I don't have a guitar with me, friend, but
thanks for askin'," Willie told him.

"I can fix that," he said. "But first, a
toast to the greatest performer that ever lived. Simone, it's on
me. To you, Willie!" and Willie couldn't very well not drink his
whiskey, after which Simone poured him another one.

While the man next to him was telling Willie
the story of his life, a guitar appeared from somewhere in the
vicinity of Bob Beezle, and someone slid it down the bar toward
Willie, much to the disgust of Simone, since there had been drinks
on the bar before the guitar knocked them off.

He picked up the guitar confidently. It was
an old Ovation, curved plastic back. Good sound. The strings didn't
seem too old as he ran down them with his thumb. "What do you want
to hear?" he asked.

"I don't know. You're the singer. Play
something," the man said. "Simone, another drink for my friend
Willie."

Willie tuned and began to play one of his
old standards, a Mexican song he had learned as a youngster. As he
sang the words and strummed the familiar rhythms, he couldn't help
seeing the bodies of the family lying in that ravine, a whole
family, maybe more than one, wiped out as if they were coyotes or
cockroaches. The tune he was singing was a happy one, but the pain
of the memory lent it the death-edge common to so many songs in
Spanish, what the poets called duende. He closed his eyes as he
sang and was a little surprised to suddenly hear the announcer of
the wrestling match talking over him. He opened his eyes.

All of the patrons of the bar had turned
back to the television, including Bob Beezle, who had just reached
up to turn up the volume so it drowned out Willie's song. The tune
died away under his fingers.

"That'll be twenty-two fifty," Simone told
him.

"Beg your pardon?"

"For the gas. Twenty-two fifty."

Numb and disoriented again, Willie dug for
money and discovered he didn't have any American money. "Excuse me,
ma'am, I need to go back out to the car. I just got back from a
trip and only have foreign money on me."

"No tricks, buddy. I can see your license
number from here," she said.

Willie first wanted to kill Beezle, or at
least yell at him, and then wanted to die himself. He half expected
the van not to be there when he got outside, for the whole trip and
everybody who'd been on it with him seemed to be a dream. The
people in the bar didn't appear to be aware of anything strange but
continued with their pastimes as if he weren't there. He didn't
think Beezle would hear him if he called him names, didn't think
his fist would connect with anything solid if he tried to punch the
man. He felt dizzy, disoriented, and had the queerest feeling, as
if he hadn't played at all.

Then he told himself maybe he'd just played
badly, even though he knew he had improved as a musician about
seven-hundredfold in the seven years he'd spent abroad. But to
these people his music simply made no difference. Those jerks just
preferred the television. If there was magic in his music, they
were immune. Funny, when Beezle had claimed to be a fan.

Puzzled and pissed off, Willie wove his way
out to the van, noticing that maybe abstention hadn't been so good
for him—he couldn't seem to hold his liquor like he used to.

The half-moon was high and the stars were
bright as he crunched across the gravel parking lot, away from the
neon signs. A woman was leaning up against the van, looking up at
the moon. She was wearing boots, jeans, a tank top, and a Stetson
and turned to smile at him as he walked up.

"Hi there, sugar. How was your glorious
comeback?"

"I remembered the goddamn song, which was
more than I did when I left this country," he growled at her.

"Hush now, sweetie, you'll wake all the good
people in the van. Come on back inside and I'll buy you another
drink."

"I don't need a drink, but if you could
scare up twenty-two fifty, and I know you're just the gal to ask to
scare things up, I'd be much obliged, and I wouldn't have to wake
anybody." He didn't mind in the least taking advantage of the
Debauchery Devil.

"Why, Willie, you've gotten considerate in
your old age!"

"Look, lady, can we just drop the crap? What
are you doing here?"

"I came to warn you, Willie. You know what a
soft spot I have for you."

"Yeah, baby, I know. You're all heart."

"No, but really. You saw how those people
acted in there. You're just going to be beating your head against a
wall if you try to play that some old stuff. Nobody wants to hear
it. You sing about Mexican bandits and cowboys and lonesome
pickers, and most people have never even seen anybody like that in
the media, much less for real. People watch game shows and talk
shows and soap operas now. They like real-life stories about serial
killers and the latest war. They're just not interested in all that
rehashed crap you people sing about."

"It doesn't seem like it, does it?"

"No, and you've been away for a long time.
Look at what happened to poor old Brose. Lost everything, even that
beat-up old stock of his. The kids he was trying to help are all
working for me now. All the last part of his life was wasted
because of this kick you've been on. You've still got some of your
charisma, Willie. The people who remember you will follow you—well,
except for that guy in there. Don't let them waste the rest of
their lives. I'm sure Gussie Turner mentioned that she came into
some money before she met you—"

"Yes, ma'am, she surely did."

"I guess you realize that if the tax people
should decide she owed them a bigger cut than what they took out at
the casino—and I guess you also realize that it could be arranged
that they do decide such a thing—she could lose the rest of it and
her house and all, whereas if they don't come to such a mean,
unfair decision, well, she could use it as a stake for all of you
to get started again in new lives. Am I makin' any sense to you,
honey?"

“
You going to give me the twenty-two
fifty or not?"

She dug into the bosom of the tank top and
pulled forth a warm twenty and a warm five. "Think it over, tiger,"
she said, and sauntered off, hips switching.

He walked back into the bar. The bartender's
unshapely rear was to him, and he saw her hard face reflected in
the mirror as he put down his money. Another old, hard,
disillusioned face was right beside it, looking straight back at
him.

Back in the van Lazarus was gently
thrumming, a vaguely familiar melody.

Julianne was awake and asked, "Well, did you
and Torchy or whoever she is this week have a nice talk?"

"Yeah, she said if we'd go home, all is
forgiven, and we can take up new careers." To avoid going into it
any further, he asked, "What is that tune? I used to know it pretty
well."

"You know, it's the Stan Rogers song about
the ranch wife who's afraid she's getting old, and every time she
looks in her mirror, she sees all these lines and can't quite
decide if the mirror is lying to her or not."

"Would you drive for a while? I'll pick
somethin' on Lazarus and keep you company."

That was the most companionable Willie had
been since they'd crossed the border, so Julianne slid over and
Willie took up Lazarus, running quietly through all the American
banjo and fiddle tunes and songs he could think of as they crossed
the Oklahoma border and drove toward Tulsa. Lazarus finally
insisted on playing, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and
Out."

* * *

As the van drove away, the man who had
called himself Bob Beezle followed by the rest of the occupants of
the bar, danced out the door and into the parking lot, threw his
tractor cap in the air, grabbed the Debauchery Devil, and whirled
her around, exulting, "I've still got it, DD! Still the Great
Deceiver! Did you see his face? No, of course you didn't, but it
was priceless, wasn't it, gang?"

The mixed group of devils and minions
absolutely agreed, all but the Stupidity and Ignorance Devil, who
said, "Yeah, the music was real purty, but he wasn't talkin' very
clear."

"He was singing in Spanish, Stu," another
devil informed him.

"Oh."

The Chairdevil hugged the cowgirlified
Debauchery Devil to him and said, "I think this is the trick! This
is how to handle 'em! We've been giving them too much big-time
attention, making them feel too important. I believe this sort of
thing—indifference, I mean, negative reinforcement, will be even
better. You'll have MacKai in the bottle quicker than Aladdin's
genie, DD. If there's anything this show-offy type of person can't
stand, it's having nobody pay any attention to him."

"You're going to call off the murderer
then?" she asked cautiously.

"I wouldn't go that far," he said.

CHAPTER 8

Ellie wasn't quite as worried as the others
about having a home to go to. Her dad had tracked her all over the
British Isles, Scandinavia, and parts of France and Germany, and if
she forgot to send postcards, he sent cards from Tulsa. Whenever
possible, she phoned home—collect—and whenever possible left her
parents a number they could call. So she was looking out the
window, drinking in the familiar sights she remembered from her
girlhood. ("There, look there, y'all! That park over there is where
Faron and I got married.")

She'd phoned ahead from the last gas station
and took the wheel for the last leg of the trip. Her folks' house
was just the way she remembered it—almost.

Faron jiggled her elbow and pointed to the
old maple on the front lawn. It was gift wrapped with a big yellow
ribbon and a huge yellow cluster bow.

She didn't have much time to admire the
effect, however, because the screen door banged open and her daddy
waved at her from the front porch and started trotting down the
cracked cement toward the car. Her mama, who was a jogger,
outstripped her dad and reached her first, enveloping her in a big
hug.

"Ellie, for Christ sakes!" Faron yelled,
grabbing the wheel and stomping the brake as the abandoned van
started to roll off unattended.

"Good to see you, son, come on in the
house," Barry Curtis, Ellie's dad said, giving him a one-armed
embrace around the neck through the open window of the van. "You
folks too, come on in. Molly just went to the store and picked up
some frozen yogurt, and I baked some chocolate-chip cookies."

They sat on the floor or in the big,
cat-scarred chairs, their hands full of ice cream and fresh
cookies, their laps full of cats. Juli dozed and Willie paced.
Gussie set down her empty ice cream bowl and folded her hands in
her lap, saying, "Now I think it's about time Ellie's folks and I
heard more about your trip and what you learned after I left
Scotland."