In the Deadlands (20 page)

What more? I wondered. What
more?
Had there ever really been anything more to my life than this? Had there? Not for me, there hadn't. So why was I complaining?

What about the others? Didn't they realize that something was missing?

No, I guess not. Nobody seemed to mind. Nobody at all.

Oh, they grumbled a little bit at first—it's quite necessary to grumble when there's any kind of change in your cage, it's a fact of life—but like the weather, nobody even
tried
to do anything about it.

We've had enough war, they said. It's time for peace.

...
The peace of the grave, the soft and restful, quiet grave....

It was the Boje who refused to lie down and stay dead. So it had to be the Boje who was the first to die.

I should have been standing with the Boje. We all should have. But we weren't; we just stood by and watched while he and a few others organized their rally. Frozen with indecision, I shrugged off his request for help: “Uh, I can't do it, Boje. You understand....”

“Yes, I do. I'm sorry I bothered you, Duff.”

“Oh, that's okay. Listen, if there's anything else you need—” But the phone was a dead instrument in my hand.

I went anyway. Just to watch. I hung back at a distance and watched from the other side of the street. Far enough away so as not to be confused with them.

They had a small crowd, probably not more than two or three hundred. Once I thought I saw Earlie. He turned and waved at me, but I shook my head. He seemed to shrug and disappeared back into the crowd. They stood milling nervously in front of Bojo's place, waiting for someone to give them direction. Boje was there in the thick of it. He didn't see me; he was hassling with someone about something.

Finally, fifteen minutes late, they started. Boje brought out a huge flag; I wondered where he'd gotten it. It looked almost too heavy to handle, and he had to pass it to a taller, stronger man. Even so, it ended up they needed two people to carry it.

They began to move slowly down the center of the street. Startled drivers pulled over to the side to let them pass. Others halted in amazement, and the crowd simply flowed around their cars. Heads sticking out of windows, the drivers gaped.

Some hastily parked their vehicles and scrambled to follow the Boje's group. Curiosity mostly. They too wondered who would be so foolish as to do this kind of thing in this new kind
of day. Others, annoyed, threw their cars into reverse, backed away, and disappeared down side streets.

I followed the group, still keeping my distance.

By the time they reached their destination, the big intersection at the center of the city, the crowd had grown to four hundred, maybe a little more. They flooded over the sidewalks and filled the street—loose knots of people, individual stragglers, curious bystanders.

They filled the intersection. Cars and buses came to a grudging halt, and after a few minutes their passengers spilled wonderingly from them to join the crowd. Meanwhile, Bojo was clambering onto the hood of a car—Earlie's battered Ford, it looked like. Someone put a bullhorn into his hands.

There was scattered applause as he began to speak, but it died away quickly; the people wanted to hear what he was saying. “My fellow countrymen,” he began, and his words sounded silly. And feeble. But with the bullhorn, they cut through the air sharp and clear, only to be cluttered by their own echoes bouncing back off the buildings. Still, if one strained, one could make out their meaning.

“My fellow countrymen,” he repeated. “We're here today to...to wash our flag. It's been disgraced.” No reaction from the crowd. “Our country has been taken from us. Yes, taken.” He paused again, still unsure of himself. The crowd waited, still not sure of itself. “But that is not the disgrace,” he continued. “Our shame is that we have
let
them take it.”

Again he paused, looking around for some reaction. Here and there, one or two people started to applaud, but quickly stopped when they saw they were alone. The crowd continued to wait. Bojo put the bullhorn to his lips again. “While we sat by and did nothing, they took over.
And it's time we took it back—or at least showed them that we are not going to give away anything so precious as our freedom.”

Still no reaction from the crowd. Bojo swallowed nervously and went on. “Do you know how many men died in the revolution that gave birth to this country? Do you know how many men have died since then to preserve the ideals on which it was founded?” He looked out over the crowd, letting the question sink in.

“No,” shouted a self-appointed spokesman. “How many?”

The Boje looked momentarily at a loss. “Uh, I don't know,” he admitted. “I'm not a historian. I'm only a cafe owner.” Laughter, harsh and mocking, drowned out the rest of his words. I gritted my teeth, looked at my shoes. Oh, Boje, Boje, Boje.

He waited until the noise died down and began again, this time a little angrier. “But I can tell you this much—it wasn't enough!” The crowd went silent.

“If more of our men had been willing to fight for those ideals—those ideals they said they believed in—there wouldn't be soldiers in our streets today!”

“Yeah! You tell 'em!” someone in the back shouted. This was followed by a couple of other yeahs and a scattering of applause.

Boje smiled appreciatively, gave a nervous wave. “Okay, I will. Uh, I'm sure there's not a person in this crowd who hasn't been touched by the war. We all know someone who's been fighting for us. Probably we all know someone who's been killed while fighting for us. Are we going to turn to them now and say, ‘Thanks a lot, but it wasn't worth the fight'?

“It's our turn now. It's our turn to show that we believe in the battles we've been sending men off to fight for the past two hundred years. It's time for us to show that these men haven't died in vain.”

He opened his mouth to go on, but the crowd interrupted him with their applause. Boje waited, surprised, but standing tall, growing taller every second.

“If we don't take up our fight now, it will be as if we have never existed at all and it will make all of those other deaths meaningless. Nobody's going to give our country back to us unless we show them that we want it back. It's time to show them that we can be killed, but never defeated.”

The crowd applauded that too.

And that's when the tanks moved in.

It wasn't a very good speech, and there wasn't much in it that was original; but the Boje had died for it, and that was enough.

They say that you can't fight a war unless you have a cause, and you can't have a cause unless you have a martyr to identify it with. If so, Boje had given us both. A cause and a martyr.

There was a sullen undertow of resentment afterward —a kind of “it wasn't necessary to kill him, he was harmless,” attitude. After all, it wasn't if he had been planning to make any
real
trouble. He was only making a speech.

And this was followed by, “Why did they have to react so hard and fast anyway? What were they afraid of?”

“Maybe the Boje was right—maybe we should...”

It didn't take long for the incidents to begin. Little things, like someone spitting every time he walked past one of the ill-uniformed men. Or muttering an epithet under his breath.

And, emboldened by their success in such harmless things, there were those who dared more. It was only a matter of time until others followed the Boje. Retribution was always quick and harsh. The baggy-green uniforms brooked no disobedience.

And resentment grew. The enemy was revealing himself to be ruthless. Not benevolent at all. There were those who were surprised; more who were not. There could be no traffic with him, none whatever.

Like ghosts, flitting from person to person, the rumors rose up, murmured across the city: The enemy—yes, he was openly called the enemy now—the enemy was having too much trouble controlling the civilian population. There was talk of impressment of the young, of pass cards and controls and restrictions.

There were those who were preparing themselves for battle.

And it had taken only one incident to start it all. It didn't matter what the incident was—one would have been as good as another—but the incident that focused the mood of the people was the unnecessary death of a simple man, a man who had never done more than run a jazz cafe. And one day he had stood on a car and urged a group of other men to remember what their fathers and brothers and sons had supposedly died for.

The Boje was a veteran, so they buried him in that cemetery by the freeway, where uncurious drivers could look down and see him, just one more marker in the rows of many that flickered silently past and then abruptly were gone as each car hurtled itself up that long slope into the hills. Long rows of even white markers, they sprawled across the green, green field.

And at the edges were trees, tall and graceful, but giving no shelter at all. They provided shade only at the very end of the day, when the sun would filter yellow through them. Long, blue-black shadows lay across the upright stones, gleaming even in the late afternoon. Here lay the seeds of man, each planted carefully in the ground, each at the proper depth, and each with a neat white marker to locate and identify it—each a seed that would never sprout, and the whole a field of ungrowing.

Bojo's marker was identical with all the rest. Nothing to say, “Here. Here is the man who stood on a car and exhorted other men.” Nothing to say, “Here. Here is a man who died for his country.”

But then, there was no need to say it. Each of those silent white markers indicated the same thing. Each of them said, “Here. Here is a man who has died for his country.”

It was here at last that, if not in life, then in death, all men were “created” equal.

The sun disappeared below the tops of the trees and behind the houses and the hills to the west, behind the silent rushing susurrus of the nearby looming highway. I hefted the case of my clarinet and began crossing the loamy earth to where the others waited with Bojo.

It was going to be one for the Boje. He had given us our start and we couldn't allow him to be sent off without some of the music he had helped to make.

Loamy was already peeling his bass out of its cover. Earlie had only his snare drum. It was all he needed; it hung on straps from his shoulders. He had a bandage on his forehead, and for some reason I was reminded of another group, a trio, and one that had played long before I was born. Earlie looked as if he should have been flanked by a man with a flute and another with a flag.

Jack looked glum without his piano. It isn't that the piano is the only instrument he plays, but it's the only instruments he
plays—
you know what I mean. Instead, he had a portable electric organ, a poor substitute—but in his mind he had to be here, and this was the only instrument that might do.

We set up our instruments in silence. Not that there was much to set up or much to talk about while we did it. I fitted the pieces of my clarinet together slowly. The whole atmosphere was heavy—too heavy—and it's best to leave a man alone with his thoughts at a time like that. I
tested the keys of the soul stick and then tested them again. I still wasn't sure what we should play, but I had an idea what the Boje would like. Or would have liked.

Finally, when I could delay it no longer, I blew out a Duffy squeal, my trademark—a sort of a rebel yell on the clarinet. It's kind of like saying, “Here we are and we're ready to go and tonight we don't stop until we wake the dead.” I always begin a set with it. It's an attention getter.

I lowered the instrument and looked at the boys. They were easy to see in the bright moonlight. Behind them stretched the even white markers of the silent men, all those who had given up their lives for their country—only to have their country given up by those who stayed behind.

There were just the four of us—and all the dead. If I had thought this was going to be a private blow-off, I was wrong. It was as private as the main floor of Hell.

An interesting analogy that.

We started off with the spirituals—the songs from Bojo's childhood, the ones he had grown up with. We played them for the Boje and we played them simply—the way they were written—and without the little touches of style that would identify us in particular.

It was a warm-up for us, and more than that, it was
a
way of saying, “This is God's music, boys—not ours. It's not for us to lay a claim on these. We'll play our stuff, though. You wait.”

As the last notes faded into the shadows, and even as the echoes fell away, the silence returned. It was an almost silence; only the distant murmur of the highway hinted at anything more. But all else was still. They were waiting.

We lifted our instruments again. This time we were going to play
our
music. This time, Bojo would know who it was standing above him and sending the notes sobbing into the night.

“A set of three, the way the Boje liked it.
This is Your Land,
first. Then, the one about the hammer. And after that, the
Battle Hum—
and we're gonna wake the dead with that one. We're gonna do some blood stirring, an' old Boje is gonna climb right out of that grave when he hears it.”

And we did.

We swung into the first one,
This is Your Land—a
song with one of those melodies that grabs you in the blood and makes it flow, a sweet and sour tingle that swells inside you until it shatters your walls and bursts out as a shout of joy.

Earlie laid into it with a bite, and Loamy found things that the bass could do that I'd never heard it do before. Jack picked it up easy and rolled the melody up and down his keyboard. He had a hornlike sound, but at the same time soft and plaintive all around.

I picked up my stick and started hurting. It'd be nice to say how it squealed and hollered and howled, how the notes hurled themselves across the lawn, shrieking even as those white markers scraped at the belly of the sound. But it wasn't. It wasn't like that at all, and if I had expected it to be, I was surprised.