Picking the Ballad's Bones (20 page)

The man with the braided
beard said, "So the dude ended up in some woman's mind, huh? And
then she died and meanwhile old Sir Walter is running around in
that lady's mind and they're looking for those other folks and all
of this is for a few tunes? Why don't they just, you know, turn on
the radio?"

"Get real, man! You can't
play that stuff on the radio anymore. Any deejay caught spinning
some song with stuff about guys wanting to boff their sisters or
fathers hitting their daughters or guys killing other guys because
of some babe, not to mention the woman miscarrying right there at
the end of the song, shit, man, anybody played a song like
that or sold it to some kid in a store would do a
hell of a lot
more time than guys who
actually do go around boffing
and beating
their nearest and dearest, not to mention murderers."

"I guess that's right. At
least then they didn't have all this censorship stuff."

"Unless you count getting
beheaded if you made a joke about royalty or singing a derogatory
song about the Douglases in their castle, forgetting to change the
clan to some other clan like Kerr," the storyteller said.
"Censorship in those days was often fatal."

"You sound like you know
all about it from personal experience," a young mother nursing her
baby said. "Like you were alive back then."

"In a manner of speaking,
I suppose you might say I was."

* * *

Faron came awake with a jolt inside a
dark room full of rattling things. The room was freezing cold and
seemed to be moving. When his eyes adjusted to the lack of light he
saw that he was lying with his nose pointing up at the nose of a
wooden horse. He seemed to be lying on a merry-go-round
platform.

Something warm bumped him and he
surmised, correctly, that it was his wife.

"Ellie, you okay, babe?"

"Hell of a headache, about to freeze
to death, otherwise fine. What hit us?"

"The arsonists, I guess. Gussie? You
here?"

After a long moment with no answer
Faron shrugged, then realized Ellie couldn't see the shrug, and
said, "Guess not. There's a merry-go-round here."

"The truck said something
about a circus. Must be the kind right out of a Ray Bradbury story,
huh? Like
'Something Wicked This Way
Comes
.' Wish we could ride this painted
pony out of here. Oh, shit."

"What?"

"We missed the ghost. The Wizard's
ghost. I bet it's already up and everything's all over and we
missed it all."

"Well, not quite everything. If
everything was over and solved, how come we're still here? You
wouldn't happen to have a match or a lighter or anything, would
you?"

"No, but I've got my combination
flashlight and key chain in my pocket," she said, and with a click
a thin beam of light pierced the gloom like a laser
sword.

"They don't seem to have been all that
serious about holding us here," Faron observed. "Didn't even tie us
up. Let's see if there's anything we can use to escape. A crowbar
would be handy."

"And maybe a motorbike so we could
just zoom out of here. Got the time?"

"Yeah—about one a.m. Say, you don't
happen to have a compass on that key chain do you?"

"No, that's on my Swiss Army knife.
I'll bet we're heading for Edinburgh though, what do you
think?"

"How do you figure that?"

"It's the nearest city. Easier to get
lost in a big city than out on the roads someplace. Hey, what's
this?" Her foot had bumped against a smallish, curved-sided object.
She reached down and touched it with her hands, feeling along its
sides, which bulged, drew in and bulged again, followed by an
elongated piece. The flashlight beam bounced off of something
black.

Faron was crawling under a tarp over
some other piece of equipment and called back in a muffled voice,
"Well, what is it?"

"A fiddle."

"Yeah?" He stumbled back toward the
beam of light.

She had already opened the
case and held the fiddle in one hand, the bow in the other. "Why
don't you play it? Maybe
it's
haunted by the ghost of Stradivari. The way this
trip's been going, I wouldn't be surprised at anything."

"I don't think Stradivari's ghost
would be much help to us. Probably has the attitude of the symphony
musicians: if it ain't classical, it ain't music. Feels nice
though." He lifted the fiddle to his chin and the bow to the fiddle
and sounded a note, tuned, sounded another note. "Gorgeous tone,
huh?"

"So play something."

Faron hemmed and hawed and
sawed around for a few minutes, then launched into a Cajun tune
he'd gotten
off
an old Doug Kershaw record, "Diggy Diggy Lo." In between
choruses he took proper breaks and sang, Ellie pitching in with
harmonies and an occasional "Ahh eee!" for atmosphere.

"That warmed me up. Play something
else." He started "Louisianna Man," which he remembered just fine
since, to the best of his knowledge, Doug Kershaw was still alive
and, the last Faron had heard, was traveling around Australia. One
chorus and one verse and one bridge into the song, the truck sighed
to a halt and Faron halted too. "Look, they might come back here
and try to stop us," he told Ellie. "If they do, I'll try to
distract them and you make a break for it. Now's our best time,
before they decide to tie us up or take us someplace
else."

"Okay," Ellie whispered.

Footsteps crunched across gravel
outside while they held their breath. Voices speaking in some
foreign language were raised and then one of them said something
that had the tone of "Yeah, yeah, sure" and the argument stopped
while more crunchy footsteps grew gradually fainter, then died away
altogether.

Faron exhaled the breath he had been
holding since the truck stopped, and at that moment there was a
scrabbling near the rear of the truck and the doors swung open, the
night air rushing in upon them.

"Out with you, you two," a voice said.
It sounded old, anxious, and with a northern English or Scottish
accent with an overlay of another, more exotic, accent.

"Okay, okay," Faron said, and
scrambled for the doorway. "Where to?"

"Hide in the woods. Run! Giorgio, he's
gone to piss but he'll be back soon. Go!"

"Okay, thanks."

"Wait."

"What?"

"My violin. My wonderful
nephew-in-law no longer
lets me make her
sing. He tells me to burn her but I don't
do it and now, hearing you play her, he says he'll
break
her in half. Take her and keep her
safe. Now, go!"

They went, hoping that
Giorgio had a very full blad
der.

CHAPTER 19

Anna Mae Gunn knew something had gone
wrong when she emerged from the haze that had suddenly swallowed
the banjo and the kitchen after she passed the banjo on to Brose.
For a moment she found herself staring back at a young man whose
rakish grin reminded her of Willie MacKai. He was dressed in fancy
old-timey clothing, humming a black humor of a tune, at once both
lilting and minor, wind rippling a black tarn. He opened his mouth
to let fly with a particularly strenuous note and she found herself
on the inside looking out of his eyes, into a mirror where he
admired himself very greatly.

"And will you love me and me alone
forever and ever, my darling Clark?" asked the nude woman on the
bed, and Anna Mae knew at once what the mix-up was, because the
woman on the bed looked like her. She should have been in that
place, not this one, but here she was.

"You know I will, dear, in my
fashion," Anna Mae's host replied with a laugh.

"You've given up those little trips
you take to the shore then to visit our local banshee?"

"Now how would you know about
something like that? I won't have you distressing yourself with
idle gossip, my poppet."

The woman, his wife, the
mayor's daughter, threw her pillow at him. "Everyone knows about
you and her, Clark, and I swear, if you go near her again, I'll be
so
shamed I won't dare hold my head up
anymore. She isn't human and everybody knows it."

No, she certainly wasn't and Margaret
the mayor's daughter most certainly was human. You could see her
skeleton right through her skin and feel it too. She was bony, not
bonny, this woman.

"Why the hell'd you marry
her then, sport?"
Anna Mae asked her
host.

"How many times will I
have to ask myself that and will I ever be content with the
answers?"
he responded, as he thought, to
himself. For he, like Sarah, thought of the new voice within him as
simply another of his own inner voices. He had from time to time
harbored many voices as critical as Anna Mae's but usually managed
to silence them at least long enough to embark on some new venture
that would rouse them again. Now he sought to appease these new
doubts with a barrage of justifications.
"Here I am the best catch in the country, good-looking,
fair-spoken, well off, thanks to the woman my wife says is not
human. God and my mother know I am a solicitous son and so can be
expected to be a dutiful husband, so dutiful that I put aside my
own preferences to do the right thing. And now I wonder if it's the
right thing at all."

"Doesn't sound to me like
you were doing her any favors. "

"Oh, but of course I was.
J saw her father's note didn't I? She had gotten herself so worked
up she threatened to die on the spot if I didn't marry her. That
moved my mother's heart to pity
—
that and her well-endowed dower.
'How will you provide for me when I'm old, Clark? Me
and your sisters and you with no daddy. You can't
just lark
about the country doing nothing
in particular all your life. You need a wife and family and a
position 'she said. And I asked, 'Mother, have I not always
provided for you since Father died? Have you ever wanted for
anything?' That was a big mistake. She had a list. But she's my
only mother and it's little enough I can do that makes her happy.
So I saw no reason not to accommodate this rich girl about to die
for love of me. I can look away from her
sharp chin and the little mustache and if her hipbones are
enough to disembowel me, I can always pad her with
pillows."

"Or maybe get a fat
mistress,"
Anna Mae said
sarcastically.

But the man, who was as much her new
self as Sarah had been Willie's, was immune to sarcasm.

"There's a thought. But I
have to explain to the current one about the wife first. I dread
this. She is a sweet, dear girl and I owe her so much. She's always
looked after everything for me. In fact, the things I've been able
to get for my family already are gifts from her. I just sing this
little song and she comes running with whatever I need. I'm tempted
to call her in now and let her have it out with dear little
Margaret"

"Don't you
dare!"

"No, I don't dare, it's
true. At least not here. But who knows, maybe Lillian will take a
shine to Margaret and provide for us all."

"How do you expect her to
do that?"

"If she can find sunken
treasure to supply me and my mother and sisters with goods, surely
she can find enough extra to support my wife as well. If I explain
it to her that I won't get the time to come and see her as usual,
or a moment's peace to myself if I allow my wife to control all of
the family's fortunes, surely she'd rather keep helping out than
lose me altogether, hmmm?"

"We are a little mercenary
about this whole thing, hmmm?"

"That's not being entirely
fair to myself. What am I good at, really? I am pleasing to a
lady's eye, can bespeak her as she desires, and also have a
facility for horizontal refreshment due to my natural endowments.
I'm an artist, in my own way, and were I talented with paintbrush
or lute, and born to a miller's family, though I might concede to
my family's wish that I go into the miller's trade that ill suits
me, still I might wish to privately pursue my own art form on the
side, might I not? I don't see a particle of difference between the
cases."

"Hmph,"
Anna Mae replied. Damn Torchy Burns and
her infernal spells! The bitch
would
have had to make
Anna Mae play conscience to some insufferable antique
cock-of-the-walk. Which ballad was this anyway? It had to be one in
which he murdered some poor girl and threw her in a convenient body
of water for bearing him some tangible fruit of his "artistic"
labors.
"So you really don't give a damn
for either of the women, do you? It's all a game to
you."

"Well, not too much of a
damn,"
he replied.
"Though if it were left to me alone, I prefer my mistress,
for she is sweet to me as she uses me and I believe she loves me.
But how much of a damn do either of them really care for me? My
wife needed to marry me, if not some other, so that she could say
to her gossips 'my husband this and my husband that' and complain
of me or brag on me, never for my own sake but for hers. I give her
the position of a married and
respectable
woman, not one who has been left by the way
side. I will naturally supply her amply with children. As she
has a rough tongue and is not the fairest lady in the
district, my services are not those she could
acquire for the
fee of her considerable
but not inexhaustible dower, and well she knows it. In having me as
well as her own wealth, she will be the envy of her friends. And if
I amuse myself elsewhere with gaming and dalliance, who can blame
me? A man must have some diversions from toil."