2024 Phoenix
Banjo had spent until sundown with Nora to keep her from eating anxiety meds and anti depressants, to lock up the wine and lead her in prayers, even accompany in her crazy mother’s favorite Southern Baptist hymns.
The entire day later, she clung to him in the doorway. He kissed her tears away from those flushed cheeks, having forgotten how salty such things were from his discarded boyhood. That gesture—or was it a drink—cheered her and she bucked up to him going and smiled, afraid to say goodbye and more afraid to ask if he would return.
His space was open. Easing back under the black willow he had rarely taken time to consider before, knowing it to be a vulture roost, home to two wretched pair, now excoriating himself within for being so without care, to have slept these past weeks under their willow eves.
He made the car ready, an early, harvest moon rising.
‘Can I sleep?’
‘Should I sleep?’
‘Will I sleep?’
He stood by the open door, considering the moon, “Lord, seeding this terrible now—I will sleep, won’t fear what you send by dream.”
He heard his prayer under the sudden rustle of the willow leaves. He fancied he saw a bird or a dragon cross the face of the moon. He knew though, that it was a flight path and he was merely witness, not to a sending, but to a lolling, sloe-eyed tune of forget, zombies being flown back east to “hunt money” as Hitcher John would say.
He tasted her tears again.
‘How much of a man am I, really?’
A coward’s shiver shook him.
“How much am a man am I?” he spoke into the light of the moon.
He wanted to play the Banjo, now understood how fearful Nora was, wanted to send sound out shadow way to keep his fears at bay.
He began to sweat and looked to the gargoyle forms of the vultures, the four huddled upon their roost, under the silver moon.
“I will sleep,” and he bedded down, widows down, inviting what the mighty frown sent into his soul. He did sleep with his boots on, and slept he did.
The river of dream caught him in its current.
Nora sobbed down by the river, every tear adding to its sad, slow torrent of torment.
Hitcher John, who had once recalled that Mrs. Dangerfield had called him “Old Harrower” came to where Banjo sat on his keen paint pony, waiting for the Bushwhackers to come take his Jayhawker scalp.
‘This must be a nightmare,’ he chuckled from the saddle, down to John Harrower, whose name he had somehow failed to compute until now, ‘a goddamned Yankee I am?’
John drawled, filling the world with a real voice, bringing physical hearing into being, “You are a Virginia man, if a bit westerly o’ mind, in your every bone.’
John held his banjo, simply slapping the case, its owner having not once taken it from its covered place since meeting Old Stump in Grand Junction, oh so long ago.
“Here they be, Grim Knight, rebelling under cover of Lady Night,” and so the banjo and its untuned strings within hummed, hummed as the paint rocked, his saddle slipped, and he woke to some tweaker prick plopping ass down into his driver’s seat, too late seeing the boots there next to him, looking down with tittering eyes at the blue jean covered legs, following them into the recesses of the moonlit back seat where Banjo heaved up ax in hand and thrust the sheathed head of that nighttime companion into that lolling mouth clearing teeth to fall like bloody corn over the gear box.
“My car!” growled Banjo as the tweaker mewed and spilled out onto the lot like his teeth had his mouth.
Banjo kicked himself out in a ball from the passenger’s side door, left the thing open, the keys in his penny pocket, leaped and slid over the hood in one smooth dreamlike motion. He was on his feet behind the rising tweaker as it sprinted as if out of invisible starting blocks for the loading dock, the shortest cut out to the service road.
The tweaker was only about 25, long, lean, young and springy spry. Banjo might have caught him if he had not been impeded by Ax, glorious Ax, killer Ax, Ax rage, ax might, chopping tweakers all night! The weapon, formerly a camp ax, was out of its sheath and swinging lightly in his right hand as he flew in booted feet after those swifter sneaker clad feet.
Out after the sneakers the boots ran, possessed of a purpose of their own, in concord with AX!
Some strange passenger in this dreamy chariot of rage was yelling, “My car! My car! How dare you break into MY CAR! Take me to your tweaker army, bring me to the feast! I will hunt you across this Kali Yuga World!”
And such like the maniac raged for miles, down the service road, out that damned anonymous industrial boulevard of bullshit plastic under titan street lights who deserved better plights to light.
The tweaker fled, pissing itself, the acrid sent of urine sparking the maniac following Lord AX, “You are mine—your soul is mine, on your grave I will rest—not until!”
The tweaker ran like those sneakers had wings, and the maniac picked up pace, his ragged raging breath crescendoing into a hoarse drumbeat of doom for the fleeing thing he thirsted for, out a perpendicular service road, down an alley where mobs of tweakers stood like sentinels watching the coursing of their doomed kin by the maniac raging from Banjo’s deep, dark within.
Turning west, following the falling moon, the doomed thing fled, Rout, Fear, and Might all crowding on its harrowed heals, hesitant Right left wringing Her hands far behind.
“I will hunt you forever!” raged the maniac.
The cotton woods, stunted yet drinking above the gutter ditch river in this sewer of a city, gathered like falcon keepers ahead.
A surge of blood thirsting hunger rose within him, and those boots overtook the sneakers as their passenger tweaker squeaked and skidded to the foot of a soldier’s tent on the edge of a tweaker tent camp the.
It was crying and praying to the old, oddly dressed fellow standing before an even older, dark-stained cedar sea chest. The tweaker was cupping those old time hard buckled shoes in his shaking hands, kissing them, “Please, please—I jus’ wanted ta sleep in something!”
It was John Harrower that the tweaker prayed to like a very Hermes of pagan deliverance.
Harrower looked to the maniac warrior, speaking to the hand that wielded AX, into his abysmal eyes, and answered the aching heart there in gaze ‘Mercy,’ as he answered the shattered soul at his feat in words, “Why, Poor, Harrowed Friend of Mine, Norny Time spins on her loom for thine,” with these strange words Old Harrower, who looked suddenly ancient with grace, opened the lid to that cedar chest to reveal soft blue light flickering within.
“My Poor Soul, climb ye within and know a serene hammock swung over the Gray Wrought Sea.”
The shivering tweaker crawled eagerly up over the latch ring and curled within the chest that should have barely admitted a child, but there did fit, smiling in cozy comfort, curled like a babe in the womb.
John Harrower, now seeming younger even then when they had met, but with his gray blue eyes lighting to azure, extended his hand in the from of giving to the chest as he closed it with his left, “Grim Knight, your steed to Madam Night.”
The maniac, barely kept from homicide by the grace of his old never where friend, noted that the top of the chest had transformed into a saddle. AX riding easily in his hand, he straddled the saddle and buried the weapon in the maiden head—jutting as it now did from the front of the trunk, like a mariner’s icon from a ship’s bow—with a chunk, a chunk that brought a mournful groan from the occupant of the strange chest, a groan that caused the maniac to sit higher in the saddle and regard the gathered mob of tweakers with disdain.
He looked at John Harrower, who was now handing him a leather and brass spyglass in his left hand, holding a banjo shaped wine bottle in his right, and crashing that glassy instrument down to against the stern to a devil squall of glassy song. His heart ached with sorrow for Old John then, when he saw his face grin and his eyes dim to worn, stained pennies, he worried in word, “John?”
“I know, Grim Knight—you alone are bound to Madam Night.”
…
This ends the open posting of Banjo: Timejack
