With Friends Like These... Part 19

Nearby, Vincente Rivera, Milo Uccelo, and Jack Cavanack wore varied expressions of boredom, now shading into disgust. They also wore red leather and fringes. Cavanack was smoking.

Sam broke his thoughts, looked pleadingly at the drummer. "Look, Jack, can't you get rid of that stuff? All I need now is for some overzealous security guard to come sniffing back here and bust you."

Cavanack glanced up and smiled broadly. "Just killin' some time, Sam. Till your buddy-boy Willie gets here. // he gets here."

The agent grimaced, looked absently at Rivera.

"If I were you, Sam, I'd have me a fast set of 197.

wheels standing by. Because if we sit here much longer, that crowd's going to get ugly. And I sure as h.e.l.l am not going to be the one who has to go out there and explain things to 'em."

"Right on," Uccelo concurred. "This ain't no recording-studio jam session."

"Don't you think I know that?" Sam cried. "If that son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h forces- me to have the gate refunded ... 1"

"Hey, isn't that him?" broke in Rivera suddenly, standing up and pointing. Sam whirled.

Sure enough, a familiar gangling figure was loping toward them, escorted by a pair of security fuzz. Cavanack had enough presence of mind to pitch his smoke under a hunk of scenery from some long-dead play. Sam halted the singer with a hand on each shoulder.

"Don't do things like this to an old man, Willie. I can't take it anymore. Listen to them out there! They're ready for you. Ready and primed. Now go out there and-"

"I'm not going out, Sam."

Parker stared blankly at him, then grinned sickly.

"Aw c'mon, Willie! Don't joke with me. Like I told you, I'm too old for this stuff."

Willie looked half dead and dead serious.

"I mean it, Sam. I'm not going to play."

Parker stepped away, somehow managed to keep the agonizingly painful smile on his face. It was as real as margarine, but he kept his voice under control.

"All right, Willie. Why don't you want to go out there?"

"Because of this." He fumbled with his shirt, tossed a crumpled ball of paper onto a chair. Sam looked over at it, then back to the singer.

"It's a letter from my grandfather," Willie explained. "He'll never win the n.o.bel Prize, my grandfather, but he's a great man. You see, he saw the story about the Seattle concert, too. Told me my kind of singing isn't 198.

Wolfstroker meant for a big group of people. Said that I was embarra.s.sing my ancestors."

Sam tried to understand this, but he couldn't. There was no reference point for him in this cultural desert, and he admitted it.

"I don't follow you, Willie. I'd like to, but I don't. How the h.e.l.l can playing music disgrace your ancestors?"

Willie stared at him with eyes of limpid oil. "Sam, where do you think my songs come from?"

"I thought you made 'em up, Willie."

The singer shook his head.

"No, Sam. Only the words. Most of the music is based on chants. Old medicine chants, Sam. Pa.s.sed down in my family for hundreds of years. It's all the inheritance I got. Grandfather thinks I'm misusing them. I don't know that I go along with him-I don't feel so good-but I respect him. So I'm not going to play, dammit! Can't you just believe that and leave me alone?" He stumbled, looked around wildly. "I need a drink."

Sam leaned close to him, sniffed. "On top of what you've had already?"

A silly grin spread across Willie's face. "Does it surprise you?"

"No, of course it doesn't, Willie. Now you just go out there with the boys and give those good people a song or two, and I'll go and get you a nice fresh fifth of good stuff, whatever you want. Not the crud you've been gargling. How's that? Look at it this way; you won't be playing for a crowd, just for yourself. That's okay, isn't it?"

"I don't know, Sam, I-" He blinked.

"I respect your grandfather's opinions, too," pressed Sam, "but you've also got a responsibility to those people out there. Most of 'em stood in line for hours for the chance to hear you, Willie. Listen to them!"

"WILLIE, WILLIE, WE WANT WILLIE!".

"You can't disappoint all those thousands. Be like going back on your own generation!"

199.

Willie stood quietly and for a moment seemed almost sober.

"They're not my generation."

"Okay, okay, however you want to look at it." Sam was beginning to lose Ms patience. "But you go out there and play for them. You've got an obligation to them. And you've also got one to the boys here-" he indicated the three waiting musicians, "-a legal one to me, and to the folks who put up the money for this concert."

Willie tried to draw himself erect but couldn't quite hold it. "I see. That's how it is, huh?"

Sam looked back at him without wavering. "I'm afraid it is, Willie. For tonight, anyway. You'll feel better tomorrow and we can talk then and-"

"No, no, that's all right, Sam, I follow you. I follow you real good." Onyx eyes blinking, the dark side of the moon. He swayed, caught himself. "Bet you think I've been playing for you, huh?

"You-Jack, Milo, Vince-you think I've been playing too, don't you?" He turned back to Sam and smiled that sick, humorless smile. "Well, I got something for you. I haven't been. Not really. Not back in that filthy backwater club where you found me, not hi the studio that time, not in Seattle. You want me to go out there and play-all right."

Sam tried to calm the singer but Willie wouldn't give him a chance.

"What's the matter, Sam? It's okay. That's what you want, that's what you get. Get yourself a good seat, Sam. A real good seat. One where you can hear well and see, too. Because I'm going to play, yes." He subsided, mumbled to himself. "Tonight I'm going to play."

He spun and walked toward the stage. The others had to hurry to make the entrance with him.

A tremendous ovation met them, a roar of expectancy as the four musicians appeared on stage. After the long wait the audience was keyed to fever pitch. Some of them had been hi the Aquarius that night in 200.

Wolfstroker Seattle and had come all the way down to L.A. for this night. They didn't cheer or yell. They just waited. Uccelo had gone first, running past Willie. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his ba.s.s and hurriedly hummed out the opening warm-up theme * he'd composed. The crowd dropped its frenetic greeting and relaxed into a steady, familiar cheering and clapping, maybe a bit louder than that accorded the average new group.

Sam levitated a sigh from the vicinity of his ulcer and patted his face. Tomorrow Willie probably wouldn't -even remember what he'd said tonight. Sam picked up the balled letter and shoved it into a pocket. Then he walked into the wings and settled down to enjoy the show.

Willie ignored the crowd and picked up his waiting guitar. He turned it over and over in his hands, ran them sensuously up and down fhe shiny, spotless instrument. He was smiling at something.

"Play, dammit," Sam hissed, fearful for a moment the singer might do something stupid like chuck it into the audience.

But it was okay. Willie put the strap over his head. He snuggled the guitar firm to his slim body and started to play.

Hush-dead silence greeted the first note. It was all wrong, that first note. It was too deep, too strong, too bad. It woke dark shapes that hid in the back of the mind, woke insect legs that creepy-crawl at night under bedsheets. It made the hair rise on the back of Sam's neck. Willie held it, choked it, wouldn't let it die. It wavered, floated, and finally drifted away crying from its mother the amplifier.

Willie's fingers began to move. A tune emerged from the guitar, a low, ponderous, mephitic melody the like of which Sam had never heard before. It had granite weight and the patience of blowing sand in it, and it came straight from h.e.l.l.

Blank-eyed, Milo joined in, his perfectly picked ba.s.s a black brother to Wiliie's guitar. Drivin' Jack grunted and kissed his drums; thunder walked the stage. Ri- 201.

vera took the harmonica from his lips and sat down at the organ. And Willie began to sing.

A first clap, forlorn and naked, peeped from the thousands. Then another, and another. Then the whole sixteen thousand were clapping and moving in unison.

Willie played and he sang and he sang and he played. He played for ten minutes, twenty, thirty. Before you could think to breathe they swung into their second hour, never pausing, never resting, the same Hephaestean beat, the same haunted rhythm, with Willie piling variation on top of variation, weaving a spider web of blood-pulsing harmonics. Somehow Drivin' Jack and Milo and Vince hung on, stayed with him.

Willie sang about the good earth and about rape, sang about young trees and sang about bate. He sang about the things man does to animals and about the animal man. He sang about man poisoning himself with envy, about dead-eyed children and too-young killers. Mostly, he sang about his people and their life and the writhing, insane alienness that was the white man's. He cursed and he prayed and he d.a.m.ned and he praised.

He took that audience up to Heaven and banged their heads against the gates. He dragged them kicking and screaming down to the fiery pit.

And then, the sweat streaming off his face and his clothes hanging limp from his body, pulling him toward the ground in cpllusion with an evil gravity, he began to sing about the Things That Made no Sense, that were less and more than all that had gone before, and, in that was Madness.

The crowd screamed and howled at the constricting concrete sky and steel beams, wanting the stars. They broke and beat at themselves and one another in a frenzy.

Sam sat in the wings and shivered on the lip of his own private delirium as Willie sang hate and burning, sang anger and the final fire that burns in every man's heart. And he saw the wolf.

202.

Wolfstroker But it wasn't gray this time. It was a twisting, spinning ball of four-legged yellow flame that shifted in his arms. Willie's right hand was stroking its flank and the crowd shrieked. His left hand scratched an ear and they moaned. Then Willie played a note that shouldn't have been. The wolf-thing opened its jaws and howled an unearthly sound poor Sam Parker could never have imagined. It didn't come from Willie's throat, was sure.

Hunching in his arms, the wolf-thing spun and clamped its fire-teeth over Willie's mouth, and seemed to swallow. Willie Whitehorse became a pillar of flame.

Sam whimpered and fell to the floor, covering his eyes.

Eventually, lots and lots of sirens came.

VHL.

Estes Park, Colorado, is a tourist town, an attractive tourist town, at the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. Once upon a time, the park and the rest of Colorado belonged to the Shoshoni and Wind River Shoshoni, the Ute and the Arapahoe. Today most of the state belongs to the Colorado River Land and Development Company and innumerable b.a.s.t.a.r.d cousins.

But it was beautiful country and as tourist towns go, Estes Park wasn't bad. Neither were the neat little homes that nestled in the hills behind the town.

A late-model Chevy pulled up in front of one of them and a man got out. He looked at the numbers on the mailbox and then at a piece of paper he held. The paper was wrinkled badly, as if it might have once been crumpled in a fist. The man walked up to the hand-hewn wooden door and rapped on it. There was no bell.

The man who opened the door was very old. But he was straight as his long white hair and had a merry grin to go with the strings of bright beads around his neck, the faded dungarees, shirt, and a big turquoise ring on one hand.

203.

WITH FBDENDS LIKE THESE , ..

"May I help you?" The voice was wise, patient. "I'm Sam Parker," the figure said. He glanced at the paper, back at the guardian of the door. "Are you John Whitehorse?"

The oldster nodded. Sam said, "I knew your grandson."

Eyes widened slightly, their owner stepping back from the door. "Come in, please." ' They walked into a small but nicely appointed living room. A baby played quietly in a playpen in the far corner.

"Sit down," invited John Whitehorse. Sam did. He looked at the child.

"That is Bill Whitehorse/* the old man informed him. "My grandson's son."

"I didn't know," Sam confessed apologetically. "Wil-lie never mentioned him. Is Mrs. Whitehorse ...?"

"Died in birthing. The boy came in whiter, in the middle of a terrible storm. He was very early. The doctor tried but could not get here in time. The woman-" and he gestured at the strong figure standing in the hallway, watching "-and I did what we could. Willie never recovered."

"Then he had no other family?"

The old man shook his head slowly.

"His father, my son, was killed in the last world war. There is a picture of him on the table to your right."

Sam peered over the side of the couch. There was a faded black-and-white photograph of a man in uniform in a small flat gla.s.s case. It centered a circle of shiny medals and two oak leaf cl.u.s.ters,. Sam noticed the medical insignia.

"His father was a doctor, then?"

John Whitehorse smiled. "All the Whitehorses have been men of medicine. As I am, and my father was, and my grandfather. Beyond that I do not know for certain, but it is so said in Council.

"We wished it for Willie, too, but. . ." He stopped. "Why are you here, Mr. Parker?"

204.

Wolfstroker "I took charge of the body. I wanted to make sure there was someone who could aff-would want to bury him." Whitehorse nodded. "Do you know how he died?"

"There was some news in the paper that comes from Denver," said the old man, "but not much." He seemed sad. "It was a very small item. I had to look hard for it."

"There was a riot," Sam began. "Fourteen people were killed. A great many were injured. An important building, the Atheneum, was nearly torn down by the audience during Willie's performance. Many of them don't remember what happened. This sort of thing has happened before at similar concerts, but never anything approaching the scale and violence of this one.

"Two of the musicians who were playing with Willie suffered severe shock. One of them is still being treated by doctors. He may not be able to play again, I'm told."

John Whitehorse nodded. "They were close to Willie and they followed him too far. I am glad they did not die."

"As for Willie," continued Sam, watching the old man with eyes that had lately seen too much, "the story being pa.s.sed around is that he'd doused his guitar with gasoline. Then he set it afire-as a gimmick, an audience-pleaser-but it spread to his clothes before he could get rid of it. I believe he would b.u.m hot-he had enough alcohol in him-but that's not what happened. There was no gas on that guitar, was there?"

John Whitehorse looked tired. "Nadonema, the wolf."

Sam's mouth tightened, but he looked satisfied. "Yeah, the wolf. Everybody thought it was done with trick lights, with mirrors. How was it done, old man?"