Bone Music (30 page)

Lisa had her arms wrapped around the Lady’s leg; she looked terrified. “I don’t want to go back to the city,” Lisa said. “I’m too scared to go.”

The Lady frowned, and her frown was more beautiful that the smile of a beauty queen. “We need you, Lisa,” Santa Barbara said.

“I won’t go,” Lisa said. “I won’t I won’t.”

The Lady nodded; after a moment she turned away and started out of the bayou. Dan Alvarez, Robert Johnson, dead Elvis, and Polly Ann all followed her, one by one by one. When they were almost disappeared into the bayou jungle, Lisa gathered up the glittering jewels that were the Eye and hurried away to join them.

As the night came down upon them all.

Western New Orleans

The Present

Things didn’t work out for the fighting couple like Emma hoped they would. Oh, they kissed and made up, all right, and weren’t they sweet like that, isn’t forgiveness the bounty of our hearts? But it didn’t last. Because just the moment after they kissed, store security came bounding out the front door of that Kmart and arrested the poor lady. And who could argue with them? Her husband tried, but it wasn’t like he really had a case — his wife had assaulted him with a metal rod, and that’s serious criminal stuff, and where there are three dozen witnesses it doesn’t matter whether the victim testifies or not, because the crime is the crime and there’s plenty of evidence.

Jury might feel different when it got to court, but there’s a long way between arrest and the jury.

“Get your hands off my wife,” the man told the security guard — and that wasn’t any security guard at all, Emma realized, it was a real policeman with a gun and everything, and look how he took the handcuffs off his belt and put them on the lady. . . . “Did you hear me, mister? I told you, ‘
Get your hands off my wife
.’”

As they spoke a crowd gathered around them, pressing close to fill some morbid curiosity. “This woman assaulted a customer,” the policeman said. He said it like he worked for the store, not the police. Maybe he was moonlighting — yes, Emma thought, that made a kind of sense, the man was such a crab because he was working double hours for the city and the store. “Store policy — she goes downtown to the lockup. We let her go and she hits somebody else, the store could get sued.”

“But she’s my wife!”

“You want to bail her out, that’s your business.”

The man was beet-red, furious; when he put his hand on the policeman’s shoulder there was no mistaking that he meant it as a threat. “I’m not going to let you take my wife away,” the man said. “I don’t care what you think she’s done.”

And then the policeman did the thing that made everyone who saw him choose his side or the other.

He pulled his gun and aimed it at the man’s head, right between his eyes.

Cocked it, and stood there still as stone, half a millisecond away from death and blood and thunder. “Don’t touch me,” he said. “You shouldn’t ever touch an officer of the law.”

And he was right, so far as that went, even if everything about the way he said it was so wrong.

Not that it mattered, right and wrong and all. Because there was something demoniac in the air, and it was in the policeman and husband just as it’d been in the wife, and when the beet-red husband heard the policeman say don’t touch me he didn’t think the way any rational person would; he thought, That bastard is going to hurt my wife, and there wasn’t a gun in the world that would have scared him, no matter if it was pointed at his head or not. He looked the policeman in the eye, and he smiled, and fast as lightning his arm went up to knock away the policeman’s gun hand, and Lord he was fast, it really was some devil in the air to make a body move that fast, and of course the policeman fired but it was too late, he missed the man and his shot went wild —

His shot went wild into the crowd and struck a child.

It got crazy after that. The cop lost hold of his gun, and the irate husband tried to beat him to a pulp, but the cop wasn’t that easy to take down, and there was the same demoniac hand guiding him that guided the husband, and the child’s mother wailed as she screamed for an ambulance, and half the people in the crowd tried ungently to pull the husband and the cop apart, and the other half tried to help the fight on one side or the other, and suddenly Emma realized that everyone was fighting.

Everyone but the wounded child and the handcuffed woman.

The child was going to die if somebody didn’t do something.

She really really was.

The handcuffed woman had it damn near as bad, because in the violence and the confusion she’d lost her balance and got knocked over, and without her hands she had a hard time getting to her feet, and Emma saw her getting trampled. . . .

As darkness settled on the city.

And in the darkness Emma saw the most amazing sight: she saw the devils that worked the mob, fomenting hate and ugliness, pounding and beating on the people who they whispered to, driving them to breed the evil in their hearts.

The Present

When Stevie Ray Vaughan got to Furry Lewis’s place on the south side of Chicago, he found Tampa Red on the dead bluesman’s couch. There was a White Sox game on the TV, and Red was watching it intently, as though the fate of the world hinged on its outcome. Any maybe it did; Red had a feel for things most other people can’t imagine.

Furry Lewis was in the kitchen, drinking coffee; he wasn’t much for television. He owned one, but he didn’t really watch the thing.

Vaughan didn’t knock. He’d had the run of Furry Lewis’s place ever since that morning Furry found him wandering the cemetery. He opened the door with his key, saw Red and the game, nodded, and headed for the kitchen. “What time’s the bus?” he asked, because that’s the way hoodoo men are, they take the bus even when they’re heading halfway across the continent.

Busses keep them closer to the land.

“Ain’t got no time to take the bus,” Furry said. “Ain’t got no time at all. Whole City of New Orleans is on fire, riots all over town. Louisiana governor just called out the National Guard.”

“You want to fly?” Vaughan asked, incredulous. Furry Lewis had never set foot inside an airplane, so far as Vaughan knew; never as a deadman, surely.

“I want you to call those folk you used to know, back when. I want you to rent us a plane. A charter, don’t they call it?”

Vaughan laughed. “I wouldn’t call anyone I knew,” He said. “They’d think I was a ghost, or worse. And maybe they’d be right.”

“You can’t do it, Stevie Ray?”

Vaughan held up a hand, shook his head. “Oh, I’ll do it, all right. If we’ve got the money I can find a way to get a plane.”

“There’s always money,” Furry Lewis said. He didn’t need to say another word; Vaughan knew he had access to money as he wanted it, same as Vaughan did. There’s magic in a deadman’s song, and money draws to that magic as surely as the rain draws toward the soil. This would be significant if the dead had any use for the stuff, but generally they don’t — Furry Lewis could have lived in splendor on John Henry’s forgotten Mountain if it pleased him. But the Mountain is a lonely place these days, populated chiefly by the vapors of those the world has very near forgotten, and Furry Lewis didn’t need that kind of emptiness, no matter whether he was dead or alive. He could have kept a Mansion; he could have kept a city thrall to serve him if that had pleased his heart — but it didn’t. Furry Lewis kept a simple upright home on the South Side, not far from where the projects face Lake Michigan and Gary, Indiana. It suited him precisely.

“Okay, then,” Vaughan said. “You got a phone book here? I thought you did. Give me a few minutes with the phone. I ought to be able to get us something.”

Bayou Country

Pushing toward New Orleans

The Present

When the sun came down and the moon went up the Devil’s henchmen were everywhere like beggars on the streets, watching them hungrily with eyes that spoke demands they never put to words, and now there were more of them and more still till the bayou jungle grew thick with devils like a plague foretold in the scripture.

Dan Alvarez didn’t like it. At all. The moment that he saw the first of them he was certain the devils meant to set upon them — and he was right. But for the longest time they hung back from Dan and Polly, Robert Johnson and the Santa, dead Elvis and the baby trailing after them.

“The Devil never comes when you expect him,” Polly said. “He never could.”

Dan stole a glance at the fiery specters hiding everywhere around them in the bayou jungle, and he was sure Polly had to be wrong. “This is Hell,” he said. “Everything you see is here because the Devil abides it.”

And Polly looked at Dan as though he were so stupid. “You’re wrong,” she said.

Dan waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. When he got tired of waiting he made a derisive sound and asked her what she meant.

“I mean that Hell is the kingdom of the damned — you can’t go to Heaven if you can’t get right with God, and if you can’t get to Heaven then you’re going to go to Hell. But that ain’t the Devil’s fault, no matter where you go.”

Dan wanted to argue with her, because everybody knows Old Scratch is the Prince of Lies and Darkness. But he didn’t know where to start, not least because he knew that she was right.

“Devil’s just as damned as everybody else,” she said, “but worse.”

“No,” Dan said, “the Devil is temptation.”

Polly laughed. “He likes company. But he can’t damn you. You got to damn yourself.”

“Not me,” Dan said. “If I go wrong I’ll repent.”

She laughed again. “Everybody always says that. But the things that damn us all are the ones we’re sure are right — things we love, things we’re proud of. Things that we accomplish! It’s easier to say ‘I repent!’ than it is to do it.”

Dan gestured at a set of eyes, peering at them through the thickness of the jungle brush. “You think they’re waiting for us to repent?” he asked, and then he laughed — too hard, too long, too mean.

It was late dusk, now, and the devils seemed closer than they’d been before — much closer. Threateningly close. Dan looked up to measure daylight by the darkening of the sky, and saw that there were only moments left to them.

But it didn’t matter if the sun went down, did it? The moon was already up, full and bright — bright red, tonight, deep bright red like a blood moon.

Dan heard the music in his head, clear as though Furry Lewis sang it for him: Now when the moon / come down in blood. . . .

Dan shivered at the sight.

“There isn’t time to stop and stare,” Polly said. “We have to hurry.”

“The sun is gone,” Santa Barbara said. “Sing!”

And Polly sang. After a moment Dan joined her; and then Robert Johnson sang, too, and when Dan heard that voice his own song felt so thin. But he sang anyway, because he knew he had to keep the night at bay.

Suburban New Orleans

The Present

“You better get that engine started,” Leadbelly said. “Crowd’s about to run a rage.”

“What?” Emma asked. She hardly even heard him speak; she was too engrossed, watching the crowd, watching the devils that sifted through it — all but invisibly. Emma could see them, now that the sun was down, and the people in the crowd walked and moved as though they saw the ones who walked among them. But they didn’t seem to see — they acted like the devils in their midst were just their neighbors, just ordinary people whispering to them, chiding them and needling them to lure them toward damnation. . . .

“I said you better get a move on,” Leadbelly said. “I think there’s going to be a riot.”

Emma laughed nervously. “That’s silly,” she said. “This isn’t any riot —”

But she was wrong. Just plain wrong. Because the moment that she spoke a second security policeman came out of the Kmart, carrying a shotgun and a bullhorn.

And he used them both.

Bullhorn first, raising it to his mouth, and shouting into it: “Put your hands in the air, all of you,” he shouted through the amplifier. “Put your hands in the air and stand perfectly still. Or I’ll shoot you all.”

The crowd didn’t really react until he threatened to shoot — and then it reacted in about the worst way it possibly could, surging toward the officer, roaring in unison like a pack of blood-crazed predators.

The policeman reacted the only way he could — he started shooting. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM round after round out of the shotgun, and now there were blood and bodies everywhere, people screaming in agony people dying people cut to ribbons dead and oh by the way there weren’t any devils anywhere to be seen once the shooting started.

As Emma started the Buick’s engine and put the car in gear; as the blood-mad mob kept coming, surging into the shotgun fire, BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM more and more dead people everywhere but they didn’t stop, and now they were pouring out of the store, hundreds of them coming down on the policeman from every direction to tear him limb from limb. . . .

The last thing Emma saw as she tore across the parking lot was the sight of the second policeman’s decapitated head flying into the air, trailing blood and brains and entrails as the mob shrieked and screamed in ecstasy.

Meigs Field, Chicago

The Present

Vaughan didn’t have any trouble finding them a plane. At all. Forty minutes after he picked up the telephone receiver they were out at Meigs Field, getting on a twin-engine turboprop Vaughan had chartered. Twice as they crossed the field people looked at Vaughan like they’d seen a ghost, but nothing came of either of those sightings — partly because Vaughan caught their eyes as they saw him, smiled, shrugged, and said, “People say I look like him, it’s funny, isn’t it?”

And it ended there, both times. Of course it did! Everybody knew Stevie Ray Vaughan was a dead man, and no sensible people ever think they’ve talked to ghosts.

Red and Furry Lewis looked uncomfortable as sin getting on that plane. Vaughan didn’t understand why, at first — didn’t understand until they were in the air, soaring through the sky, and the trouble came on him.

So hard.

Vaughan was a giftie bluesman, and he was a deadman, and when he sang amazing things would happen, because of who and what he was — but he was also a city boy, and he didn’t know his lore.

Didn’t know a lot of things he should have known, in fact.

“What the hell. . . ?”

“The soil,” Furry Lewis said. He looked quivery and ill, like a man about to die of some terrible disease. What he meant was, there’s a connection between a deadman and the soil, and a deadman soaring through the air is a man severed from his subsistence. Vaughan didn’t get all that, but he got enough from the two words Furry Lewis said to understand the trouble. He reached forward to tap the pilot’s shoulder with a trembling hand, and he said, “Fly low. Low as you can.”

The pilot started to argue with that — with good cause, since it went counter to their flight plan and their instructions from the air-control tower — but Vaughan held up a hand to silence him. And then he whispered a verse from Sister O.M. Terrell’s take on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which is about as hip and bluesy as a gospel number can be.

And the pilot swung low, just as Vaughan’s song commanded.

It got a little better after that. The deathliness and the cold receded, and the song that deadmen call the music of the world came back to them, or nearly did, at least. It never got comfortable while they were in the air, but so long as they flew low Vaughan didn’t feel as though he would expire.

Not that he felt good. Just the opposite, in fact — the flight was miserable, even agonizing. When air-control directed them to land a hundred miles early, outside Baton Rouge, it almost came as a relief.

The pilot peered back at them, cleared his throat. “The tower said Lakefront Airport is closed,” he said. “New Orleans International, too. Closest open field is Baton Rouge.”

Vaughan nodded. Furry Lewis groaned, and it looked like he wanted to say something, but the words never came.

“All right, then,” Vaughan said. “Get us as close as you can.”

The pilot nodded; banked the plane and started the descent toward Baton Rouge.

“We’ll have to rent a car,” Vaughan said. “It’s a drive from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Not a long drive, though.” Furry Lewis nodded weakly; Tampa Red didn’t even seem to hear. Red didn’t look like he was hearing anything, in fact — he looked dead. Corpse-dead, as though he’d gone back to his damnation or on to his reward.

As the plane swung wide, banked again, leveled, straightened, and touched the runway.

And the aching stopped, and the music of the world became a song large enough to consume them, to propel and define them, and Red whimpered like a man released from agony.

“Praise God,” Furry Lewis said. “I’ve never known a longer hour.”

Slower, now, and slower still as they approached the terminal and the plane eased to a halt. The pilot secured the brakes and opened the hatch to let them climb out of the cabin.

Vaughan got dizzy trying to stand up; Furry Lewis left his seat unsteadily. But Red was worse than either of them — by a lot. He stumbled as he left his seat, and then stumbled again on the stairs, and Vaughan began to think he’d never find his legs. Vaughan took his arm, and helped him down onto the runway.

“You going to be okay, Red?” he asked.

Red nodded, but he didn’t look good. He didn’t look good at all, in fact.

“You want some help?” Vaughan asked, and when the other deadman didn’t answer Vaughan put his arm over Red’s shoulder, and steadied him for the walk across the tarmac. As they entered the terminal Red seemed to find his legs, and Vaughan released him — but he kept close to Red, watching him carefully.

“Where from here, Stevie Ray?” Furry Lewis asked.

“Car-rental counter. Up ahead and to the left.”

Just before they got to the car-rental counter, Red stumbled again. Vaughan barely caught him in time to save him from collapsing to the floor, and when he tried to steady the deadman Red’s legs went to jelly underneath him.

“Red. . . ?”

“I’m okay,” Red said. “I just took a little faint, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” Vaughan said. But he didn’t think so, not for a moment. “Think you can make it to the counter? Car’s right past the counter, by the door.”

“I’ll be fine,” Red said. “You know I will.”

And he waited for Vaughan and Furry Lewis to reassure him, but neither of them did.

“Why don’t you take a seat, Red?” Furry Lewis asked. “Wait with him, Stevie Ray. I’ll rent the car.”

Vaughan nodded. “I’ll do that, if you like,” he said. “It wouldn’t take a minute.”

“No trouble,” Furry Lewis said. “You think I don’t know how to rent a car?”

The truth was that he didn’t know, because he hadn’t had a need to rent one in the years since he’d passed on, and while he’d rented cars for the great King back in the early fifties, the car-rental business has changed dramatically across the decades. But it ain’t like doing business with Hertz takes rocket science; and anyway Furry Lewis had charm enough to fake the parts he didn’t know.