“Eddie. Eddie Fiddler.”
“Well, tell me now, how many songs you know, Eddie?” Henry hoped that perhaps they had just gotten off to a bad start. Stage fright maybe. He had heard it happened to the best of them on occasion. Even Esther, probably the least self-conscious person he’d ever met, occasionally got the jitters if too many voyeurs crowded into her tent to watch her play a tune on some john’s skin flute.
The boy looked at the banjo picker for help, but the old man had his eyes glued on the women. “Oh, hard to say, really,” Eddie said weakly. “A few, I reckon.” Last evening, out of their minds on a bottle of moonshine called Knockemstiff that he had traded his shoes for, they had stolen a dozen baby chicks from a coop in somebody’s backyard and ate them alive for dinner. He had awoken this morning tangled up in a patch of ivy with a raging headache and a tiny beak stuck between his two front teeth.
With the tip of his finger, Henry tapped the boy’s forehead hard several times. “Do I look like someone you wants to be a-lyin’ to?”
“No, sir,” Eddie mumbled, afraid to move. Staring at the cross hanging from the big man’s neck, the realization of how low he had sunk since leaving home suddenly brought on a wave of nausea, and he had to swallow several times rapidly to keep from blowing feathers and booze all over the man’s shiny black boots.
“So, goddamn it, how many do ye know?”
“Two,” the boy answered. “The one we just played, plus’n another one. We ain’t been together all that long.”
“Now why in the hell didn’t you tell me that before I brought you all the way out here? You and that ol’ soak done wasted my whole morning.”
“You didn’t ask. Besides, Johnny says all music sounds pretty much the same anyway.”
“Lord Almighty!” Henry cried. “That’s got to be one of the dumbest fuckin’ things I ever heard in my life. How long you been playin’ that harp anyway?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Eddie said, trying to remember just how many days it had been since he and the old man had met. “Maybe a week?”
“Sonofabitch,” Henry muttered as he turned and headed toward the wagon.
The banjo player made a great show of bowing to the women and smiling with his gum ridges, then asked the boy, “Did we get the job?”
“I don’t think so,” Eddie answered as he watched Henry climb up on the wagon seat and unwrap the reins from the brake handle.
“Well, shit, ask him.”
“Johnny wants to know if we got the job?” the boy called out.
“Fuck, no,” Henry yelled. “Now get your asses in the wagon so I can haul you back to town.”
“Come on, Johnny,” Eddie said. “Looks like he’s in a hurry.”
“You go on,” the old man said. “I’m a-thinkin’ I’ll just stick around here awhile.” He winked at the whores, then eased himself down on a stump and began strumming the banjo slowly, as if he was about to serenade them with a love ballad.
As the boy climbed into the wagon, Henry said, “What the hell does he think he’s doing?”
“Oh, it’s hard to tell with Johnny. Sometimes he gets a little crazy if there’s a woman around.”
Henry stared at the old man for a minute, then cursed and jumped down off the wagon. Stomping across the campsite, he grabbed the banjo picker by the back of his frayed shirt collar and started dragging him away.
“Don’t you hurt him, Henry,” one of the girls warned. “He don’t mean no harm.” Her name was Matilda, and with her freckled pug nose and pigtails and tiny tits, Blackie was often able to pass her off to older men as a fourteen-year-old runaway fresh off the farm. She was also the most likely of the three women to cause trouble. Her father, a coal miner in West Virginia, had coughed up the last black shreds of his lungs on her eighth birthday, and she had nursed an abiding sense of injustice ever since when it came to workers’ rights. Her face was still recovering from a bruising Blackie had given her last week after an argument over menstrual cycle pay.
“Shut the hell up, Matilda,” the bodyguard said. “This don’t concern you.”
“Oh, yes, it does,” she said. “You lured that poor old man out here with the promise of work, and then you turn around and treat him like that? It ain’t fair, is it, girls?”