After an hour, though, all we’d seen was trees, lining the road so thick they choked the daylight from the sky.
“We don’t want to be running out of gas on these roads after dark,” Arnie said. Like me, he’d been watching the gas needle burrow toward the E.
I pulled over. Though we hadn’t eaten since lunch, and had only the two quarts of homemade that Whiffer, the washboard man, pinched off the back shelf in a dry goods store in Detroit—nobody groused. It wasn’t natural that there’d been no towns along the dark road, and the prospect of calming ourselves with a sip or two, even unfed, sounded fine enough for that particular moment. We stayed up late, drinking rot and telling lies, then slept as best we could, being hungry.
Late the next morning, when Arnie’s eyes cleared well enough to drive, we got going again. From the get-go, nobody spoke, and I supposed the nervousness to be testament that we was still driving through dark trees. I had no firsthand knowledge of the conditions along the road, of course, slumped as I was in the backseat, cradling my pickled head in my balled-up suit jacket, wanting only smoother roads.
After a time, Arnie slowed the car as Billy laughed with what was surely relief. I opened one eye to the white fire of the midday sun.
Tadesville looked like any other one-block bump in the road: a dinky grocery, a feed store, and a long building without a sign, all of it squatting parched on brown dirt. It didn’t have a gas station. Hell, it didn’t have cars. I closed my eye.
“Amish, Arnie,” Billy opined from the front seat. “Everybody else has cars.”
“Amish in the middle of Michigan?”
“Four-tuner,” Whiffer said from beside me.
“Better not be,” Arnie said, pulling to a stop. “We need gas.”
I turned on the seat, trying to burrow my head into the mohair upholstery.
“Look,” Whiffer said beside me, the smell of sour mash coming out of his mouth hot, like bus exhaust. “Jimcrack’s heart started up again.”
Henry Olton is my name, but with the banjo, given names get flushed quicker than beer-joint toilets. I’ve been Huskweed, Bobby Barn, Twangin’ Tom, and too many others. Jimcrack, as in Jimmy Crack Corn, was just the latest.
Arnie cut the engine. The pounding in my head pulsed louder in the quiet.
“There’s no people,” Whiffer said, after a bit.
“Amish,” Billy said from up front.
“Just working people, too busy to be laying about on an afternoon,” Arnie said. Getting out, he sent my side of the car up a hundred feet. Then he slammed the damned door, firing a red thunderbolt into my skull.
I kept my eyes shut tight and swore I’d never touch another drop. “For sure there must be people here,” Billy whispered quick to Whiffer and me in the back, but he sounded more like he was wishing than saying. “It isn’t right, not seeing towns for miles, then coming to one that’s deserted.”
Arnie’s shoes padded around slow in the dust outside the car. He was checking things out. His shoes came closer. “Got to be people here,” his voice said through the open window. “Best we just relax in the car until four thirty.”
Whiffer exhaled slowly beside me. Arnie opened the driver’s door and got back in. Mercifully, he latched it gentle.
We dozed in the afternoon heat. I been to some dead places, but Tadesville had them beat to hell. No cars, no horses pulling wagons, no people walking by. Not even the air moved.
Ordinarily, that kind of quiet made me itchy. Not that afternoon. Trying to muffle the oil derrick slamming in my head, I was appreciative.
“Four thirty,” Arnie shouted. He probably did no such thing, probably hadn’t even raised his voice, but I had not as yet healed.
The three of them scrambled out, rocking the Plymouth like a rowboat in a squall. I hugged the seat and held on.
“Jimcrack!” Arnie yelled through the window. “Showtime!”
My door got yanked open. They was going to make me die standing up.
There was no choice. Ever so gentle, I eased onto my knees and backed out of the car, presenting myself ass-first to the bright of the world. After some confusion, my feet found the dirt, and I hugged the side of the Plymouth until it, the ground, and I were all moving in concordance.
Someone set my banjo case against my leg. “Strap on, Jimcrack,” Arnie said. “Time to yodel.”
Steadying myself with the door handle, I opened my eyes just enough to ease down vertical and hoist out the banjo. Banjos have lots of metal to make them ring loud, and even in sure hands, they weigh like lead. That afternoon, I was strapping on a battleship anchor, and it took both Billy and Whiffer to pull me up onto the trailer. With my eyes again blessedly shut, I began tightening the tuners, riffing into a few simple rolls I could do in my sleep.
“If the river was whiskey, and I was a divin’ duck,” they started singing, with me croaking the base harmony, “I would dive to the bottom; I never would come up.”
Like I said, in most towns those lines were surefire to bring folks nodding and laughing. But not that afternoon. Not in Tadesville.
I opened my least painful eye to the quiet. There was nobody there but us.
“This could be a one-tune town.” Whiffer’s brushing hand fell from his washboard. “First ever.”
“Can’t happen.” Arnie eyed the empty street. “We need gas.”
He started picking “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” on his guitar and we picked it up. Plenty of towns, gospel was all that worked. We played “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” then “Amazing Grace” with a ripping banjo break by yours truly, especially considering each of my fingers was trembling at a different speed. Bedrock religious stuff, we played it loud enough to raise corpses. Billy even did his jig, jumping down and shaking around like he was summoning rain onto a drought, but we might as well have been playing in a cave. Nobody came.
Arnie set down his guitar. “We’ll have to browse.”
“Maybe everybody’s at a funeral,” I said quick, and started riffing into “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Whiffer joined in right away, rasping the rhythm hard across his washboard. He knew I hated the browsing. Arnie sighed, picked up his guitar, and strummed along, and Billy started his jumping, but it was no use. The street stayed empty.
We quit the song and looked at Arnie. He was scanning the grocery and the General Feed. Not even the white curtains in the window above the grocery fluttered.
“Easy for browsing,” Arnie said.
Browsing was stealing, and it shamed me. Truth be, we was thieves more than musicians, hunting most every town we played for small stuff—watches, jewelry, silverware—that we could slip into our pockets and hock when we got to a city.
We’d done it so much, the browsing was as smooth as our act. Arnie would wait behind the wheel of the Plymouth, key in the ignition, foot above the accelerator, while Billy, Whiffer, and I fanned out, carrying our instruments like we was trying to drum up attendance for a show. But we was looking for unwatched store counters and unlatched houses. Forty-five minutes later—timed exact, no matter what we had or hadn’t got—we’d be back to the Plymouth, Arnie would hit the gas, and we’d be gone.
Being deserted, Tadesville looked ripe, for sure.
“Jimcrack, also be checking garages for a can of gas.” Arnie looked direct into my eyeballs. He was telling me I’d better not come back empty-handed this time, even if I was only toting gasoline.
I nodded a quarter-inch and shrugged my arm through my case strap.
Billy headed for the grocery, Whiffer toward the General Feed, though what he was expecting there I didn’t bother to wonder. I walked the other way and turned the corner.
The side street was twenty degrees cooler and dark, another tunnel of trees. My liquored head was pulsing in march time from my fury and my shame. I’d honored myself fighting in Korea, yet here I was, skulking in a raggedy town, expected to steal a can of gas, a string of dime-store pearls, or a dollar watch from people too poor and too trusting to
lock their doors. I stepped down the center of the road, looking neither right nor left, Arnie be damned.
“Are you greedy, banjer man?” a woman’s voice whispered, cool against my ear. My heart double-thudded as I did a quick one-eighty turn. The road stretched empty in both directions.
“Greedy like your friends?” her voice came again, a caress of silk with just a hint of the South softening her words.
I squinted into the woods. The shape of a woman, white and lacy, moved filmy in front of the dark outline of a cottage almost completely hidden in the trees.
“I don’t guess I am, ma’am,” I answered back, having the queasy certainty she knew exactly what our little jug band was up to.
She moved a couple steps closer. Her hair was black in the shadows, her lips full and dusty red. At that distance, she could have been twenty, she could have been fifty. She was beautiful.
“Then play me a tune, banjer man.”
I could have sworn her breath touched my cheek.
Without hesitating at the foolishness of standing in the road, playing to someone half-hidden in the trees, I had the five-string out and cut into “Soldiers’ Joy,” an Appalachian standard from the Revolutionary War. She laughed and started swaying with the music, a shimmer of white in the black trees. I slid into “Turkey in the Straw,” “John Brown’s Dream,” “Ducks on the Mill Pond,” and a dozen more, one right after the other. She seemed to know them all, and danced in the woods while I played from the middle of the road.
After the last note of “Eighth of January,” she stopped sudden, put a hand on her hip, and tilted her head, poutylike. “Sure you ain’t greedy like the others, banjer man?” she called.
“I guess I’m not.” I wanted to look away, shamed by her knowing eyes.
“Greedy people is welcome for always in Tadesville,” she teased from the woods.
I shook my head. “No, ma’am.”
She paused for a minute. Then suddenly, her hand flew up, and something small arched through the trees and landed next to me on the road. “We’ll see,” she called.
I bent down and picked it up. It was a small, blue felt jewelry box. Inside was a man’s ring, green with cheap silvery plating, a gaudy chunk of cut glass set in its center.
I looked up. She was gone.
More than anything, I wanted to walk in those trees. To thank her, I told myself. To see her beauty is more the truth.
As I turned the little felt box in my hand, I caught sight of my watch. I’d been gone over an hour. Anyone back later than forty-five minutes got left behind, Arnie always said. Too risky for the rest to wait.
They’d be gone.
I dropped the little felt box into the open case, set in the banjo, and latched everything up. My head still hurt, and I felt dirtier than ever from the browsing and traveling with the likes of Arnie and the rest. But something new was trying to squeeze in between the pounding whiskey and the shame.
Relief.
A man don’t get many chances to redeem himself, the little wise part of my brain said. That voice never had spoken up much, but that evening, on that road, I heard it clear and loud.
The woods was all black now, the trees melted into each other. I picked up my banjo and walked down the road, away from the strange, deserted town, trying not to think about liquor and browsing and the wise eye of the lady in the woods.
After a couple of miles, the dirt road came to one of gravel, and a farmer in an old Ford truck with shreds of hay clinging to the flatbed picked me up in his headlights.
“Where you coming from, lugging that banjo?” he asked through the side window.
“Tadesville,” I said, looking up.
“Tadesville?” He pushed open the door. “Never heard of it.”
“Strange town,” I said, climbing up. “Nobody there, except a lady that lives off in the woods.”
The driver didn’t need to talk more, and we drove in silence through the dark until he dropped me just east of Kalamazoo.
I left the banjo at my sister’s and went to sea as an oiler, thinking to put an ocean between me and liquor and any other temptations on the road to hell. But after three years of smelling bilge on one of the foulest buckets ever to bob between New York and Liverpool, all I’d done was grow a stronger thirst for drink and a bigger taste for easy. I quit the ship and thumbed through the South, stupored on woods-stilled mash, looking to work at anything that wouldn’t raise a sweat. They wasn’t hiring drunks much at the time, and mostly I did road repairs for small jails in Alabama and Georgia. Breaking and entering, public intoxication, and bad luck was what got me those road jobs, until one incident of accomplice auto theft put me inside a prison laundry for three years.
I got out at thirty years of age, vowing to get smarter. I went to my sister’s. Though she’d been the one keeping the banjo all those years, I believe now that it was waiting of its own life force.
To save me, or to be my doom, depending.
THE world I reentered was full of amazements. Astronaut men was routinely riding rockets, cars had air-conditioning, and music was coming out of radios no bigger than a pack of smokes. Most incredible to me, though, was that the five-string banjo had become stylish. Beard-and-sandal Greenwich Village nuts had brought it up North and were treating it respectful. Suddenly, every street festival, county fair, and folk-damn hootenanny had to have a banjo player, and everybody took him serious. No banjo jokes.
I wasn’t good enough for a big act, but I didn’t need to be. There was plenty of easy work playing car dealerships and warming up county fair crowds, and I traveled with pickup groups all over the Midwest. The pay was miserable, but the hours was excellent—lots of time for sour mash and cards—and there was no need to risk thieving.
I took to wearing the ring I discovered lying in my banjo case because of the sparkle it gave off. Playing under a summer sun or on a bright-lit stage, I could sweep the glint off that ring like a beacon, starting and stopping, making the crowd laugh. It pleased every act I traveled with.
Never, though, did I wonder on the ring’s origin. Any remembrance ofTadesville and the lady in the woods had long fallen out of my mind, gone like so many of my other gin-triggered hallucinations.
Until St. Louis, June of 1964.
The mandolin player and I were in a hotel room playing stud poker with some of the locals. I’d dropped my last twenty, my flask was empty, and I was getting up to leave when one of them, a short guy in a black suit who’d been winning all night, asked me if he could see the ring. I slipped it off and handed it across the table.
Quicker than a pelican diving for lunch, he snagged a jeweler’s loupe out of his vest, popped it into his eye, and leaned back under the floor lamp. “I’ll give you a thousand bucks for it,” he said after no time at all.
I’m sure my mouth fell open. In my entire misapplied life, I’d never once been packing a thousand dollars.
“A thousand bucks. Right here, right now.” The little man leaned forward. His eyes were tiny and wet, like a ferret’s.
The table went quiet.
“Family heirloom,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t notice my hand shaking as I reached across the table for the ring, slow, giving him time to up the offer.
“Fifteen hundred.” He closed his fist around the ring.
“Not for five thousand,” I heard my voice say.
No one breathed. The mandolin player was looking at me like I’d just landed from Mars. Night after night, he’d seen me drop the ring like junk into my banjo case, giving it no thought. That night, I’d just forgotten to take it off, was all. Now he was watching me kiss off fifteen hundred solid for it.
The little man in the black suit hesitated for a long minute, then opened his hand and pushed the ring toward the center of the table. “Not worth five grand,” he said.
The wind went out of my chest. My brain screamed to say I’d been kidding; fifteen hundred was fine. But my gut said pocket the ring, get up easy, and vamoose.
And that is what I did, not at all sure what had just happened.
That one time, my gut was right. The next day, I got thirty-two hundred for the ring from a pawnbroker. I’d started downtown first, in a fancy jewelry store just off the main drag.
“Where’d you get this?” the jeweler asked, setting the ring down on the black felt counter pad.
“Family heirloom.” It still sounded reasonable to me.
“It’s four carat, clear quality, well-faceted,” he said. He eyed my greasy suit. “If you can prove ownership, I’ll give you six thousand for it.”
“For this ring?”
“For the diamond. The setting is junk.”
But he wouldn’t spring a nickel without papers, nor would the next half-dozen jewelry stores I tried. So I went to the hockshops, and got the thirty-two hundred. Not as much as the fancy stores, but it was better than a poke in the eye.
I bought a used Pontiac ragtop, white on black with red vinyl indoors, spinner hubcaps on the wheels. With the money left over, I embarked on a grand spree of black label whiskey and high stakes cards. The band, understandable, moved on, but that was no concern. I was living the high life.
I blew through the money in days. Most of it got left on card tables, and the last three hundred was beat out of me by two guys in knit hats outside a bar. I’d been shooting off my mouth, buying drinks for the room.
Stranded, broke, without prospect of a banjo job anytime soon, I started sleeping in my car.
And I started browsing.
At first I aimed for department store jewelry counters when they was at their busiest, taking care to nip only at vodka beforehand so the only thing on my breath would be the smell of Lifesaver peppermint. I acted the confused husband, torn between so many choices spread before me on the counter, figuring the clerks, mostly teenage girls, would be too eye-rollingly bored to notice a bauble missing when I told them I needed to think and turned to leave.
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