Crimes by Moonlight

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 sca

“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 fa

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 tu

“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.