“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.