In the Deadlands Read online

  Except this time it was different. Over it, under it, around it was this other sound. That echo I couldn’t quite place. But not an echo—a harmony? Something. It filtered in through the edges of our sound, diffracted and deflected—but always the same and always distant. And never quite drowned out.

  A sound like listening.

  We build to a crashing, thundering crescendo, and then suddenly—

  —we stop, leaving only the slow steady drumbeat, still one hundred to the minute. Right back where we started. It rolls through the room that is still reverberating with a thunder that refuses to die out. Slowly we come back in with the theme, “Glory, glory, hallelujah...” Soft and almost silent, just a hint, and let it hang in the air. Not even a repeat, just slip through it once and let it fade out.

  It takes a while for them to realize we’ve finished, but when they do it shatters their minds, and then they’re applauding, more than they’ve done all evening. “Okay, boys. Good job. Pack ’em up.”

  It didn’t take the boys long. There was none of the usual byplay and kidding on the stand. Battle Hum does that, leaves us feeling as if we’ve crashed. Another reason I don’t like it. Music should leave you feeling up.

  Abruptly I remembered that other sound and asked if anybody else had heard anything strange, but they just shrugged and shook their heads.

  “You mean a kind of twangy thing?” Jack asked. “It could have been the piano. It seemed—”

  “Uh-uh.” He hadn’t heard it. If he had, he’d have known what I meant. Either I was the only one who’d heard that other sound, or no one else wanted to admit it.

  What was left of the audience was just filtering out. Bojo was at the bar, resting his head in his hands, half a beer sitting warmly in front of him. “G’night, Boje,” I said as I passed.

  “Wait a minute, Duff,” he mumbled.

  I paused while he fumbled in his sweater pocket. He thrust a wad of bills at me.

  “Hey, what’s this? Payday isn’t until Friday.”

  “Uh-uh, it’s today. Tonight’s your last night.”

  “Huh—? Hey, now look, Boje. You and I are friends. I know we were a little loose on the first few sets, but give us a chance.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not it, Duff. Your guys are all right, and if you’ll count that you’ll find it’s for the complete gig. It’s just that this—” He paused to swallow. “This is my last night too. I’m closing it up.”

  Huh?”

  He shoved the bills at me again; I was too dumbfounded not to take them. “It’s all there, Duff—and for the two extra weeks too.” He smiled. “The two extra you always con me into. I’m sorry you won’t be here to play them. I like your style.” Then he turned back to the bar and stared into his beer. It had a sickly green cast; the glow of the black light did that to it.

  I could see that he didn’t want to talk. I hefted my two instrument cases and left.

  Outside on the street, the boys gave me that look—as if I hadn’t been telling them everything. I shrugged it off, the way I shrugged everything off. “He has his moods,” I explained. “Music does that to him. Even ours.” I said it without smiling. It wasn’t funny. “I’ll call Bill tomorrow, see if he can get us anything.”

  “Hmp,” snorted Loamy. “He’d book us into Hell if there was a percentage in it.”

  Loamy and Jack walked off. Earlie gave me a wave and crossed the street to his battered Ford. It wasn’t even one o’clock yet and already the streets were deserted. A light mist gave the buildings a feathery look, and the street lights were haloed.

  I turned and started walking.

  And suddenly it was all clear.

  Why there was no traffic, no people about.

  The tank sat in the middle of the intersection, a giant beetle, squat and ugly. Three soldiers in baggy-green uniforms eyed me uncuriously. Down the boulevard, I could see other tanks, and scattered among them, the lean hungry jeeps, the pale shadowy figures of men. And all had that air of watchful readiness.

  So it was over.

  Sometime during the evening, the whole thing had ended. We had lost it. Without even noticing.

  The great tanks had rolled into our city and taken up their positions and we hadn’t even noticed.

  It’s one thing to see it in a picture: twenty-one inches of glowing red-green-blue dots, and all so distant and far away you know it doesn’t really have anything to do with you.

  And it’s another thing to see it in person. The hulking metal shapes, monstrous and brooding—they had one purpose and one purpose only. The sullen power of great violence forged into metal shapes is always ugly.

  There was nothing I could do. I could stand and look, or I could go home.

  I went home.

  And all the way, every step of the way, the questions gnawed at the edges of my mind.

  Why? Why?

  Somehow, irrationally, I had the idea that it was ultimately all my fault. I personally was the one responsible. Something I had done had brought this about.

  But I hadn’t done anything.

  Had it been that? While I had concerned myself with providing diversions for the affluent, had others been looking hungrily after that same damned affluence? Hadn’t I known? Hadn’t I seen?

  And most of all, why hadn’t I cared?

  But, no. I’d concerned myself with my music as if that had been the sole portion of my life, and not just the soul portion. While I had been blowing—no, while we had been blowing our hearts out in the Boje’s dingy little rathole cafe, our country had had its heart blown out by our indifference.

  By my indifference. Where had I been when these ugly men in their baggy-green uniforms had come rolling silently into the world?

  Where? Providing casual entertainment for the casual who didn’t care.

  While the fat roly-poly Romans had gone to their circuses and discotheques, the lean hungry barbarians from the north had moved in. The Roman Empire never fell—it was given away.

  Oh, sure—we had known there was a war on. It was in all the papers. But wars were always fought “over there.” Never “over here.” So we worried watched that other war, the far away one, and forgot about the one that was taking place right here at home. How does it feel to be the fool, Duff? How does it feel to know that you’re one of the reasons the streets are no longer ours?

  And the city was longer ours. Nothing was ours.

  The soldiers ignored me. They were as bored as the audiences I played for. And for the same reasons, too. They knew I would cause them no excitement, no reason even to straighten up. No nothing. So why strain? Why bother?

  It was going to be a peaceful occupation.

  The poet had been right. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

  I went home, my footsteps echoing hollowly off the sidewalk and the mocking walls of the city.

  The world went impossibly on. Cats pawed through garbage; dogs lifted their legs to telephone poles; cars continued to mutter through the streets. Impossibly, maddeningly normal.

  As if they had every right to go on existing even though the world had changed hands in the night.

  There was even a sense of relief in the air that, at last, it was finally here and over with. After one startled disoriented moment, the people came back into the streets to again tend to their personal businesses. Well, they’re here, they said, and it’s not as bad as we’d thought it would be. After all, they’re only human beings, just like us...

  ...shadowy gray and ghostly silent, they sat on their street corners, polishing their guns and waiting.

  But they’re only human beings. Just like us....

  The new government was named.

  Life went on.

  The same companies sent out the same bills on the same letterheads.

  And always, the same people paid.

  But Bojo’s stayed closed, and we were out of work. Again.

  And we stayed out of work. Other places began to close up too. Not all like Bojo’
s. And not all for the same reasons. Some were better, some worse. But all were closed.

  The fools were out of work now. They’d done their job. No—we’d done our job. Indeed, done it well. There was no need for us any longer. We’d diverted the attention of the landlords long enough for the looters to take possession. And now that the looters had what they wanted, they had no more need for fools.

  Most of the nightspots in town simply stopped opening. One night they’d be playing to a half-empty house and the next the doors would remain shut and nobody would be playing at all.

  The stage shows closed; the movie theatres too, for a while, then they reopened with new films and unfamiliar titles. Only the bars remained unaffected, except that prices went up. A new liquor tax, they said.

  Everywhere the casual entertainments disappeared. Withered away and died. Their purpose had been fulfilled.

  I sat in the back of a darkened theatre, shadows flickering on the screen—shadows of the shadows that moved through the streets outside—and mourned the loss of a world I had helped to forsake.

  The colors seeped out of life, the world was gray.

  And the horror of it was that too soon we would grow used to this, our new way of life; grow complacent with the fact that the new was comfortably reminiscent of the old. After all, weren’t we still eating regular, still wearing warm clothes and sleeping between clean sheets? It’d be only a matter of time till we forgot that there had once been more to life than this.

  What more? I wondered. What more? Had there ever really been anything more to my life than this? Had there? Not for me, there hadn’t. So why was I complaining?

  What about the others? Didn’t they realize that something was missing?

  No, I guess not. Nobody seemed to mind. Nobody at all.

  Oh, they grumbled a little bit at first—it’s quite necessary to grumble when there’s any kind of change in your cage, it’s a fact of life—but like the weather, nobody even tried to do anything about it.

  We’ve had enough war, they said. It’s time for peace.

  ...The peace of the grave, the soft and restful, quiet grave....

  It was the Boje who refused to lie down and stay dead. So it had to be the Boje who was the first to die.

  I should have been standing with the Boje. We all should have. But we weren’t; we just stood by and watched while he and a few others organized their rally. Frozen with indecision, I shrugged off his request for help: “Uh, I can’t do it, Boje. You understand....”

  “Yes, I do. I’m sorry I bothered you, Duff.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. Listen, if there’s anything else you need—” But the phone was a dead instrument in my hand.

  I went anyway. Just to watch. I hung back at a distance and watched from the other side of the street. Far enough away so as not to be confused with them.

  They had a small crowd, probably not more than two or three hundred. Once I thought I saw Earlie. He turned and waved at me, but I shook my head. He seemed to shrug and disappeared back into the crowd. They stood milling nervously in front of Bojo’s place, waiting for someone to give them direction. Boje was there in the thick of it. He didn’t see me; he was hassling with someone about something.

  Finally, fifteen minutes late, they started. Boje brought out a huge flag; I wondered where he’d gotten it. It looked almost too heavy to handle, and he had to pass it to a taller, stronger man. Even so, it ended up they needed two people to carry it.

  They began to move slowly down the center of the street. Startled drivers pulled over to the side to let them pass. Others halted in amazement, and the crowd simply flowed around their cars. Heads sticking out of windows, the drivers gaped.

  Some hastily parked their vehicles and scrambled to follow the Boje’s group. Curiosity mostly. They too wondered who would be so foolish as to do this kind of thing in this new kind of day. Others, annoyed, threw their cars into reverse, backed away, and disappeared down side streets.

  I followed the group, still keeping my distance.

  By the time they reached their destination, the big intersection at the center of the city, the crowd had grown to four hundred, maybe a little more. They flooded over the sidewalks and filled the street—loose knots of people, individual stragglers, curious bystanders.

  They filled the intersection. Cars and buses came to a grudging halt, and after a few minutes their passengers spilled wonderingly from them to join the crowd. Meanwhile, Bojo was clambering onto the hood of a car—Earlie’s battered Ford, it looked like. Someone put a bullhorn into his hands.

  There was scattered applause as he began to speak, but it died away quickly; the people wanted to hear what he was saying. “My fellow countrymen,” he began, and his words sounded silly. And feeble. But with the bullhorn, they cut through the air sharp and clear, only to be cluttered by their own echoes bouncing back off the buildings. Still, if one strained, one could make out their meaning.

  “My fellow countrymen,” he repeated. “We’re here today to...to wash our flag. It’s been disgraced.” No reaction from the crowd. “Our country has been taken from us. Yes, taken.” He paused again, still unsure of himself. The crowd waited, still not sure of itself. “But that is not the disgrace,” he continued. “Our shame is that we have let them take it.”

  Again he paused, looking around for some reaction. Here and there, one or two people started to applaud, but quickly stopped when they saw they were alone. The crowd continued to wait. Bojo put the bullhorn to his lips again. “While we sat by and did nothing, they took over. And it’s time we took it back—or at least showed them that we are not going to give away anything so precious as our freedom.”

  Still no reaction from the crowd. Bojo swallowed nervously and went on. “Do you know how many men died in the revolution that gave birth to this country? Do you know how many men have died since then to preserve the ideals on which it was founded?” He looked out over the crowd, letting the question sink in.

  “No,” shouted a self-appointed spokesman. “How many?”

  The Boje looked momentarily at a loss. “Uh, I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m not a historian. I’m only a cafe owner.” Laughter, harsh and mocking, drowned out the rest of his words. I gritted my teeth, looked at my shoes. Oh, Boje, Boje, Boje.

  He waited until the noise died down and began again, this time a little angrier. “But I can tell you this much—it wasn’t enough!” The crowd went silent.

  “If more of our men had been willing to fight for those ideals—those ideals they said they believed in—there wouldn’t be soldiers in our streets today!”

  “Yeah! You tell ’em!” someone in the back shouted. This was followed by a couple of other yeahs and a scattering of applause.

  Boje smiled appreciatively, gave a nervous wave. “Okay, I will. Uh, I’m sure there’s not a person in this crowd who hasn’t been touched by the war. We all know someone who’s been fighting for us. Probably we all know someone who’s been killed while fighting for us. Are we going to turn to them now and say, ‘Thanks a lot, but it wasn’t worth the fight’?

  “It’s our turn now. It’s our turn to show that we believe in the battles we’ve been sending men off to fight for the past two hundred years. It’s time for us to show that these men haven’t died in vain.”

  He opened his mouth to go on, but the crowd interrupted him with their applause. Boje waited, surprised, but standing tall, growing taller every second.

  “If we don’t take up our fight now, it will be as if we have never existed at all and it will make all of those other deaths meaningless. Nobody’s going to give our country back to us unless we show them that we want it back. It’s time to show them that we can be killed, but never defeated.”

  The crowd applauded that too.

  And that’s when the tanks moved in.

  It wasn’t a very good speech, and there wasn’t much in it that was original; but the Boje had died for it, and that was enough.

  They say th
at you can’t fight a war unless you have a cause, and you can’t have a cause unless you have a martyr to identify it with. If so, Boje had given us both. A cause and a martyr.

  There was a sullen undertow of resentment afterward —a kind of “it wasn’t necessary to kill him, he was harmless,” attitude. After all, it wasn’t if he had been planning to make any real trouble. He was only making a speech.

  And this was followed by, “Why did they have to react so hard and fast anyway? What were they afraid of?”

  “Maybe the Boje was right—maybe we should...”

  It didn’t take long for the incidents to begin. Little things, like someone spitting every time he walked past one of the ill-uniformed men. Or muttering an epithet under his breath.

  And, emboldened by their success in such harmless things, there were those who dared more. It was only a matter of time until others followed the Boje. Retribution was always quick and harsh. The baggy-green uniforms brooked no disobedience.

  And resentment grew. The enemy was revealing himself to be ruthless. Not benevolent at all. There were those who were surprised; more who were not. There could be no traffic with him, none whatever.

  Like ghosts, flitting from person to person, the rumors rose up, murmured across the city: The enemy—yes, he was openly called the enemy now—the enemy was having too much trouble controlling the civilian population. There was talk of impressment of the young, of pass cards and controls and restrictions.

  There were those who were preparing themselves for battle.

  And it had taken only one incident to start it all. It didn’t matter what the incident was—one would have been as good as another—but the incident that focused the mood of the people was the unnecessary death of a simple man, a man who had never done more than run a jazz cafe. And one day he had stood on a car and urged a group of other men to remember what their fathers and brothers and sons had supposedly died for.