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“You’ll have to shoot me, so
And I rapped his chest with the knob of my shillelagh.
His knee-jerk reaction was to pull the trigger twice. The sound of the shots bounced through the bushes and trees. The bullets went right through my skull.
Jeremy froze, unbelieving.
Then he asked, “Why aren’t you dead?” and shot me in the head three more times.
Behind Jeremy, two mounted police officers were galloping past the boulder, riding toward the sound of gunfire.
Fingertips to shoulders, I vanished, leaving Jeremy to explain how he came to be shooting at ducks in the Central Park Pond with the gun that killed Casey Rheingold.
Tadesville by Jack Fredrickson
If you’re reading this, you found my shiny box.
If it was lying on the ground, the hanging twine all rotted, it might mean that it’s over.
But if you found it hanging in the tree, the twine tight like I checked it recent, best you run.
If you can.
Of all the things I’d done, the thing bit me to hell was being a musician. I’d marvel at that, if I had the stomach.
Thing is, most folks didn’t even consider the five-string banjo an instrument of music. It’s not the tenor banjo strummed fast by fancies sporting striped vests and straw hats, doo-dah, doo-dah. The five-wire is redneck, Appalachian crude, favored by working folks in honest denim and sweat-stained caps. Back when I could get about, the five-string banjo was like a wart on a lady’s hand-it wasn’t much seen in society, except in television nonsense like The Beverly Hillbillies or on the lap of that smoky-eyed inbred in the movie Deliverance.
In road bands, when they suffered a five-string at all, it was the banjo man who drove the car and changed the oil. Onstage, he was to stand in the back and bounce the rhythm. And be joked at. Know how you tell the stage is level? The banjo player is drooling out of both sides of his mouth.
In April of 1954, I was twenty-two and had been knocking about with three other Korea vets. We was playing jug band music-an unusual-enough occupation for white guys-hauling around in a chalky blue ’37 Plymouth with bad springs, pulling a flatbed trailer with red spoke wheels that we used for a stage. We split five ways, with Arnie, the guitar player, getting two shares because it was his car.
We’d made our way west from the Catskills, playing in towns too small to hear better. The way it worked was this: We’d pull into some jerkwater in the middle of an afternoon, four slicks in prewar suits and noticeable neckwear. First off, we’d strut around a bit, tipping our hats to the ladies, smiling at the kiddies, building interest. At 4:30, we’d throw the duffels off the trailer and climb up. Me and Arnie would start tuning, playing runs, but it was the washboard man and the jug blower that drew the people. Most folks had never heard washboard and jug, and they’d gather like bears to a dump. Up on the trailer, we’d be whooping and joking like we was having the absolute time of our lives, letting the crowd build.
At five we started singing: “If the river was whiskey, and I was a divin’ duck. I would dive to the bottom; I never would come up.”
That always got them laughing. Then Arnie would begin with the banjo jokes, and I’d shuffle forward, looking stupid, which truth be known, wasn’t a stretch. They’d laugh louder, and we’d slide into “Pig Ankle Strut.” By tune three, “Rooster Crowing Blues,” the folks was usually ripe, and that was when Billy, the jug blower, would jump down from the trailer and start scatting through the crowd. Billy blew a small jug so he could hold it one-handed, and with his other, he’d whip off his hat and start collecting. Billy wasn’t bashful; he’d shake that hat right in your chest until you was embarrassed enough to drop something in. And if it wasn’t enough-say all you’d loosed was some pe
If it was a good-time crowd, Billy would be down off the trailer a half-dozen times. Even in Christian towns, we almost always got enough for a sandwich di
But Tadesville was like nothing we’d ever seen.
The previous town, fifty miles west of Detroit, had been a four-tuner, our name for any place with two churches visible from the main square. Their police chief had hawk’s eyes, and he’d kept them on us closer than stink on skunk. “Divin’ Duck” was a thud, so we went right to singing down the gospel. That didn’t work either; those folks was saving their money for the next life, and Billy only shook out two dimes. We were packed and rolling by 5:30, hoping it was still early enough to hit a new town.
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 ru
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.”