2024 Phoenix

Sleeping in an old better sedan was rough, but a new one would be worse. Banjo cruised around the shuttered back streets of the commercial district, made a soft right turn and headed east under the ghostly glow of the adjacent lot lights. A mob of tweakers were walking west in an amorphous gaggle all the way out to the center line.

Since his hermit/nomad life had begun, the musings had increased. He sometimes wondered if he was not being contacted by Sifu Bill. He had studied Chinese medicine under the old healer at the hot springs in Montana. Thenceforth he had often navigated the swells and storms of his life with the rudder, ‘What would Sifu Bill think? What would he do?’

‘Why west? Not a gaggle—there is no leader. These creatures are frightening.’

‘Is that you Sifu Bill?’

He looked to the mirror in a moment of wonder, but was magnetically drawn to the tweakers.

Banjo tried to count in huddles, not wanting to make eye contact. No other car moved or was parked, not even abandoned.

‘If they rush with one mind I might be too slow. Don’t speed up, stay cool. Only a few are watching you. This is crazy…’

The rolling tableaux held for five, six, seven, eight, nine… 14 seconds! Finally, he rolled past the last few huddles and then beyond the handful of stragglers, including a nodding woman pushing a baby stroller which held a dirty teddy bear…

He slowed a bit more, out of curiosity, trying to count them in rough batches and multiply them as they tittered onward. Addition, multiplication, estimation, resulted in a total that must have been between 200 and 300 tweakers methed-out in one long, disorganized horde, tailed by four or five nodding junkies.

The chill in his spine maintained, a chill that rose into his brain and there haunted him, echoing the words of Hitcher John as he drove the old fellow along Old U.S. Route 40, west from Baltimore to Denver. Since dropping John off at the hourly motel on Coalfax, Banjo had not been able to quiet his soul. It was as if that old down and out tramp with his thumb out next to the guardrail in the Patapsco State Forest had been an usher of sorts.

The first thing the man had said to him was, “Thank ye, Grim Knight. One does not expect charity from he who has just ushered off such a wicked soul to Lady Night.”

‘Angels are real and I have something to answer for,’ he had thought with a shiver that would have been concealed by his stoic exterior by most souls, but not Hitcher John, who comforted him as he fumbled with the car door, as if the very idea of the thing bemused him, “I be a true Christian who judges not, Grim Knight.”

Hearing that caused his ears to flush and his eyes to focus, moving him to stay with that name, not giving out even Banjo, the moniker he had gone by for so long. Seeing that the man had an antique, perhaps ancient cedar chest, by his side, and noting the question in his eyes, he relieved the fellow, “Sir, there is room in the rear hatch next to the rucksack.”

Banjo popped the trunk and stood out next to his seat watching the man, who went about his task with gnomish precision in polite fashion, walked around and shook his hand, “Not a seat upon this bier until I have acknowledge the boatman, young and fit like as he seems—yet oh so old in his seared soul, ey? Name be John, Coachman.”

‘Knight, boatman, coachman? I am touched here by beyond, I think.’

They shook hands. Walking around back with his passenger, looking into the hatch, he saw that the man had moved the ruck from over top of Barry’s next to last resting place and put his chest there, a chest that was ancient, with brass fixtures upon dark oiled and varnished cedar. Noting Banjo’s fixture on the chest John said, “Brought that chest from Shetland with wool socks and low hopes, to have even those dashed. It be a more fitted vehicle for the damned than that far wonderful duffle—this world is all made up of wonders, Captain Grim Knight.

They had stood—no, they yet stood together on that darkened road in his mind— “John, you know me, though I don’t know you.”

The man smiled up, a fellow of about medium height, seeming a worn 45 years.

“This dearth we shall attend. In the by times, in these sinister overseen latitudes, I offer humble service as ye navigator.”

The man then tipped his hat, and Banjo noted that the curly, dirty-blond hair was attached to that odd slouch hat and that John was bald beneath.

John took note and smiled, “Blessed be your long locks, Captain,” and they walked to their appointed seats.

Banjo’s chest shivered as he came out of one of the trances that he had been prone to since Denver, just in time to break before the blaring horn of the 18-wheeler indicted him for some kind of drunk, the truck rumbling buy at double the 35 MPH speed limit.

“John, you almost killed me again, old friend,” and Banjo noted that he was talking out loud to himself again.

“But am I, talking to myself?”

The light turned green and he drove to his back lot, a lair safely away from the army of tweakers headed cryptically the other way.

Afraid to speak out loud, he mused, ‘Old Stump, Isrаel, Hitcher John, are you all from the other side calling me away from this Kali Yuga World?’

The car answered with a creak, the creak that had been the rhythm of his life since leaving that damned dark city behind.

Soon parked, the sun shield placed across the windshield, his driver’s seat left up for a quick getaway, he in full recline in the passenger seat, slid all the way back on its track, a shirt hung over both rear windows, it was time for a fast midnight sleep.

Betty would be by in the morning with a meal before it got hot. The neurotic woman was in love with him and wanted him to move in. He could not deal with the insanity of feminine cohabitation as she was gaslit by this lie-beaming world he was trying to wrap his mind around and some how summarize for his horrified soul.

The windows were slightly cracked, the temperature down to a tolerable 81 degrees, plenty of gas in the tank, the oil fresh changed.

Mind strife and fatigue combined to give way to a languid sleep that was inhabited by Hitcher John, making navigational notations along U.S. Route 40, as if he were at sea, consulting with him as to the nature of various places, as if he knew nothing of this monoculture nation.

“Up from good Colonel Dangerfield’s Plantation, afraid fallen afoul of Mrs. Dangerfield for discipline of their little Billy, insisted upon by the Colonel himself and of no harsh type, but consisting of the merest switching. Was in Fredericksburg hunting money, seeking buttons for coat making of the cotton I was growing and paying to have spun, and the Lord Jesus came to me and told me, to give up money hunting and bear my chest west—so I know you Captain for the righteous soul you be.”

He could feel himself smile in his sleep. Then he heard it, the jimmying of his front door and the opening of it to admit a tweaker face, a face as shocked and afraid as Banjo’s was flushed and enraged, “I’m sleeping!” he growled.

The tweaker, perhaps only 18 years old and blond, narrow of face, squeaked, “Sorry,” and ran.

Banjo sat up, checked round for other actors, snarled, pulled the door shut and locked it. He then looked to the rucksack of Old Stump which opened into the dropped backs eat from the hatch behind the drivers side, and slid out that antique camp ax.

The banjo in its case hummed as he jostled it. Despite his adoptive name, he had not been able to bring himself to play the banjo for pleasure or gain. He delivered food instead, a task that rankled him when delivering independence card orders to welfare slugs. Though this unease paled in comparison to the chill he felt hearing the slight, tin-hollow tone made by his neglected namesake in its hard leather case.

‘Am I the traitor? Of is it the instrument that threatens to Judas me?’

The patina upon the old leather saddle scabbard closed with leather loops and cork toggles about the head of that old ax, which he fancied had graced the saddle of Jim Bridger or John Glass 200 years gone, comforted him. But in the gathering light sleep of the car tramp night, only the odd Scottish gait of Hitcher John’s guiding voice made him smile.

“Had a nice schoolhouse on the Rappahannock, a goodly garden too…”

‘What would Sifu Bill say?’ mused he as his later portion of night came down.