Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (25 page)

The teacher, being a teacher and having
heard every kind of lie and evasion there was, soon got it out of
even an experienced sophisticated guy like Graham that the computer
was down and out and not likely to be providing fodder for lawsuits
any time soon.

"I'm sure we can work something out," the
teacher said. "This really is my own version, and you can't prove
otherwise. I'm teaching it to all of these children, and they have
my blanket permission to teach it and perform it to whomsoever they
please in perpetuity. But I wouldn't want to break the law. I would
like to register this song with your agency in the name of the
People of the United States of America with any possible royalties
to be paid directly to the fund for rebuilding the Folk Archives at
the Library of Congress."

Still steaming, Hugh Graham proceeded to
enter the registration with his company on his portable computer
linkup.

CHAPTER 18

Gussie, Terry, and Dan picked up Brose the
day after they arrived, and the four of them drove to Volker
Fountain outside the Nelson Art Gallery to discuss strategy. The
fountain was dry this time of year, the grass around it brown in
patches. Dead leaves filled the basin where water splashed in the
summer.

"Seems to me the obvious thing is to start
busking," Terry said briskly. She sat on the edge of the fountain
and shredded a leaf between her elvishly long fingers while a
breeze bearing the scent of rotting leaves brushed her straight
brown hair against her cheek. "That's what we do in the U.K."

"Busking?" Gussie asked.

"You know, street singing, playing for tips.
It comes from an obsolete French word meaning"—her voice took on
Oxford tones—"to shift, filch; prowl, catch by hook or crook. Later
it referred to cruising as a pirate. I suppose we could be
considered pirates of a sort. Anyway, if there are no legitimate
venues, I suppose busking's what we need to do."

"We could ask Monte and Nancy to have a
party," Dan suggested. He was lolling on the grass, his head
supported by hands cupped behind his neck, his long legs propped up
on the rim of the fountain. "We could sing for that, and their
guests could spread the word."

Gussie shook her head. "I been thinkin'
about that. I don't think we ought to do any music at all in our
safe houses. Might make it easy for the devils to find us and come
after our friends. Better to keep movin'."

"Busking it is then. We can do it anywhere
until we're thrown out," Terry said.

"I'd like to try the ethnic neighborhoods
then," Dan said. "I'll bet some of the Thai and Cambodian refugees
still know some of their music. And there's a big Greek and Middle
Eastern population here. Maybe I could get some of those folks to
teach me some tunes from the old country. Those devils might have
overlooked that kind of music." Dan was always interested in
singing anything he had to have translated and that would let him
practice playing some weird ethnic instrument.

"They'd probably trade you for some of the
Child Ballads," Terry said. "You know how people are—if they're
Indian, they want to learn jazz, if they're English they want to
learn Chinese—"

"If they're black," Brose said, "they might
play Balkan bands like me." He gave his button-box accordion a
squeeze by way of illustration. "On the other hand, maybe not. But
it seems like a good idea. 'Cept I got a mind to check out the
places that take care of sick folks—hospices and hospitals and
such. Bound to be somethin' happenin' there. Jails are good too.
Lotsa bored people in jails, but I might wait for that. After all,
while we're sizin' up the street scene and doin' a little buskin',
we could end up gettin' our buskers busted."

* * *

Joyce Kranz fled the classroom and the
school with life, limb, and sanity barely intact, drove across
Inner-city Viaduct and through downtown Kansas City, Kansas till
she reached the State Avenue exit, drove past shopping malls and
ugly one-story businesses until she found one ugly one-story
building in particular and parked beside several other large
American-made cars in the lot. A small sign beside the door said,
"Loyal Order of the Siblings of the Tiger, Private club, Members
only." With shaking hands Joyce pulled her keys out of the
ignition, relocked the car behind her, and walked on jellied legs
into the dimly lit club.

She wasn't doing anything wrong, though if
it was found out she'd been going to a bar to imbibe alcohol, she'd
be barred from the substitute-teaching rosters for good. Screw it.
If she could find anything else to do for a living, she would tell
the schools and their rules to shove it for good. Besides, who said
she was only coming here to drink? She could drink at home,
couldn't she? Except that if anyone saw her at the liquor store, it
would be as bad as if they saw her going into one of the few,
dangerous bars left on the Missouri side. But she had grown up
here, among the Tigers. She was a Tiger and the daughter of Tigers,
and she could come over here anytime she wanted to.

A stooped little man with a farmer's palsy
greeted her at the door. "Hello, Joycee," he said. "Sorry to hear
about your mother."

"Hello, Frank," she said, trying to smile.
She could remember this man as an iron-haired fifty-year-old,
before years of bouncing around on a tractor and eventually losing
his farm to the bank anyway had drained him worse than a
vampire.

"Come over here to get away from the Blue
Laws, eh?" Frank said slyly. Of course, Kansas was and always had
been technically dry except for the clubs, but Missouri had amended
its Blue Laws regarding the sale of liquor to extend to weekdays as
well as Sundays now. It wasn't like prohibition exactly—drinking
wasn't outlawed, but it was socially and bureaucratically frowned
upon, and health lobbyists had made liquor difficult to buy.

The bar at the far end of the linoleum-tiled
floor looked like light at the end of a tunnel. Joyce sat down on a
red vinyl stool and buried her head in her hands for a moment to
compose herself.

"What's a nice girl like you doin' in a
place like this?"

Joyce looked up, battle ready, to see a
small woman with a mop of curly gray hair grinning at her from
behind the bar.

Before Joyce could speak, however, the older
woman spoke. "Stressed out, huh? Just want a drink to calm down a
little?"

"That's right," Joyce said, and let her eyes
say, "And what business is it of yours?"

"Well?" the older woman asked.

"Well, what?" Joyce's voice came out
challenging, and she realized she was still very much on the
defensive.

"Well, what can I get you? I'm the
bartender. Relax, honey. No need to apologize. I know what it's
like these days. You think it was easy to find this job? But look,
the health nuts got a point, you know? Booze ain't particularly
good for you—especially habitually or in large quantities. But now
and then a person needs to relax, and you look like you do. So
what'll it be?"

"Is it possible to mix whiskey with a little
diet soda?" Joyce asked. She used to drink that years ago when she
still went out for drinks with friends once in a while. It had a
name, but she couldn't remember it.

"Oh, I can see right now you're a confirmed
alcoholic," the woman said. "Just kiddin'. Don't mind my big mouth.
I'm used to tellin’ stories, and I just get carried away sometimes.
Why don't you talk? Tell ol' Gussic what's got you so upset you're
driven to drink."

"It's just life. Everybody has
problems."

Gussie nodded to Joyce's hands trembling
against the top of the bar and just gave her a look.

Joyce said, "Well, how would you feel if
every time you went unarmed in front of a new class of somebody's
cherubs you had to search their hands and laps for weapons before
you could start?"

"You're a teacher then," the bartender
said.

"A substitute."

"What's your subject?"

"English literature—supposedly. I don't get
to teach that very often, though today I was supposed to."

"Must be real rewardin' in some ways,
though, to get to stand up there and talk about Shakespeare and
Dickens and all those great writers and their books all the time.
Sir Walter Scott is a personal favorite of mine."

"Really? Well, you're a minority. You know
what I teach when I am trying to teach those youngsters to
read?"

"No."

"Advertisements. Classified ads.
Occasionally, when something earthshaking is occurring and I am
working for a particularly liberal school board, we are permitted
to study current events. But no Shakespeare, no Dickens, and
certainly no Scott."

The bartender handed her a glass of
sparkling beverage. "Here. Hope that's not too strong for you. I
suppose teachin' kids to read the newspaper could be useful to
them, but you'd think their folks would want them to know about the
great writers too."

"Think again," Joyce said bitterly. "Fiction
breeds unrealistic expectations and does not properly prepare
children for life in the real world."

"Is that so?"

"That's what the handbooks all say. We are
to teach the kids that 'what you see is what you get unless, of
course, you can increase your earning capacity, in which case you
can see and get more.' Fiction is nothing but lies, blatant
escapism that leads to a distorted sense of reality and despair.
That part's not a direct quote, but you get the drift."

"I get it."

"But you know those weapons I told you
about?"

"Yeah. What about them?"

Joyce leaned over the bar, the tails of her
blouse's pussycat bow dragging through a puddle Gussie had not been
quick enough to wipe up. "I'm not worried they're going to use them
on me so much as on themselves. Poor little suckers are
desperate—and I wouldn't be saying this except that you poured me
this strong drink—desperate for some unrealistic fun. Even hopping
hormones can't meet all of a kid's needs to explore beyond the
boundaries of home and hearth and KC, Mo. Am I making myself
clear?"

"Yes, ma'am. Loud and clear. Clearer than
you can realize. I did mention, didn't I, that I am a
storyteller?"

"Yes, but I didn't pursue it at the time,
not knowing what you meant." Joyce downed her drink with a flourish
and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. "So pour me another
and tell me what you mean."

"Sure. Better yet, the place is kinda empty,
I'll give you a free story with your drink. Now one time there was
another teacher, and—‘scuse me, ma'am, but you don't have any moral
objections to stories with magic in them do you?"

"Not in the slightest," Joyce said, and
crowded close to the bar with both hands around her drink, feeling
as if she were having hot chocolate and cookies in her grandma's
kitchen.

"One time there was this teacher, and he was
a pretty talented fella in the ways of magic too. One of his old
students had made it good and become king, but he was havin' a few
problems. He fell in love—I guess you could call it love,
anyway—got the hots, at least, for the wife of one of his
vassal-lords, and nothing would do but that his old teacher had to
help him hoodwink everyone so's he could get the beautiful Igraine
in the sack. . . ."

Joyce only identified a little with
the beautiful Igraine, tricked by the wizard's magic into thinking
Uther Pendragon was her husband, suffering later when she learned
her husband was killed by Uther's treachery, then pragmatically
accepting the necessity of marrying Uther. Much more compelling to
Joyce was the plight of Morgaine, Igraine's daughter, growing up
under the thumb of her father's murderer, and of Merlin, whose
sacred magic had been used to pimp for Uther. She understood full
well why Merlin would undertake Arthur's teaching himself, to make
sure Uther's son became a
good
king, instead of a tyrant like his father. Of course, it was
all more complex than that. She hadn't thought about Camelot in
years, but now it occurred to her that there were a lot of
parallels between the intrigues of court and school politics. She
felt a little better, thinking that in some ways she and Merlin
were in the same boat.

"I had forgotten that those old stories got
old precisely because they're so universal," she told the
bartender. "It's a shame they're out of fashion now."

The bartender shrugged. "People make the
fashion. I know some others, including how stories and songs got
lost."

"Lost?" she asked. "Surely they're just not
used anymore."

"It's one of those use-it-or-lose-it
situations. And there's a reason we're losing it—the songs and
stories I mean. But that's another story."

Joyce smiled at the bartender, feeling
infinitely more relaxed than she had. Drinking
could
be therapeutic after all. "How much do I
owe you then?" she asked, reaching into her purse for her credit
card and daily-memo-calculator.

"It's on the house," Gussie said.

"No, really, you've been entertaining me as
well as those two stiff drinks. I hope I'll be able to drive."

"Oh, I think you will . . ." the bartender
said.

She was right. Joyce was able to drive home
and even enjoy the drive. She thought maybe she could slip in a few
stories after all, with tales of commerce and current events, draw
comparisons—as long as she was talking about what the school board
wanted her to, they couldn't object to her attempts to make the
material more vivid, could they? She graded all of her test papers
before she went to bed and was pleased to find the next morning
that she suffered no ill effects from her night of sin. Midway
through another awful day at school, when the discussion was
supposed to be about economics and solving the national debt, she
tried to remember the story of the king who turned everything he
touched to gold, but could only come up with a vague allusion that
baffled the students.