Crimes by Moonlight

Tadesville by Jack Fredrickson

If you’re reading this, you found my shiny box.

If it was lying on the ground, the hanging twine all rotted, it might mean that it’s over.

But if you found it hanging in the tree, the twine tight like I checked it recent, best you run.

If you can.

Of all the things I’d done, the thing bit me to hell was being a musician. I’d marvel at that, if I had the stomach.

Thing is, most folks didn’t even consider the five-string banjo an instrument of music. It’s not the tenor banjo strummed fast by fancies sporting striped vests and straw hats, doo-dah, doo-dah. The five-wire is redneck, Appalachian crude, favored by working folks in honest denim and sweat-stained caps. Back when I could get about, the five-string banjo was like a wart on a lady’s hand-it wasn’t much seen in society, except in television nonsense like The Beverly Hillbillies or on the lap of that smoky-eyed inbred in the movie Deliverance.

In road bands, when they suffered a five-string at all, it was the banjo man who drove the car and changed the oil. Onstage, he was to stand in the back and bounce the rhythm. And be joked at. Know how you tell the stage is level? The banjo player is drooling out of both sides of his mouth.

In April of 1954, I was twenty-two and had been knocking about with three other Korea vets. We was playing jug band music-an unusual-enough occupation for white guys-hauling around in a chalky blue ’37 Plymouth with bad springs, pulling a flatbed trailer with red spoke wheels that we used for a stage. We split five ways, with Arnie, the guitar player, getting two shares because it was his car.

We’d made our way west from the Catskills, playing in towns too small to hear better. The way it worked was this: We’d pull into some jerkwater in the middle of an afternoon, four slicks in prewar suits and noticeable neckwear. First off, we’d strut around a bit, tipping our hats to the ladies, smiling at the kiddies, building interest. At 4:30, we’d throw the duffels off the trailer and climb up. Me and Arnie would start tuning, playing runs, but it was the washboard man and the jug blower that drew the people. Most folks had never heard washboard and jug, and they’d gather like bears to a dump. Up on the trailer, we’d be whooping and joking like we was having the absolute time of our lives, letting the crowd build.

At five we started singing: “If the river was whiskey, and I was a divin’ duck. I would dive to the bottom; I never would come up.”

That always got them laughing. Then Arnie would begin with the banjo jokes, and I’d shuffle forward, looking stupid, which truth be known, wasn’t a stretch. They’d laugh louder, and we’d slide into “Pig Ankle Strut.” By tune three, “Rooster Crowing Blues,” the folks was usually ripe, and that was when Billy, the jug blower, would jump down from the trailer and start scatting through the crowd. Billy blew a small jug so he could hold it one-handed, and with his other, he’d whip off his hat and start collecting. Billy wasn’t bashful; he’d shake that hat right in your chest until you was embarrassed enough to drop something in. And if it wasn’t enough-say all you’d loosed was some pennies or a nickel, he’d keep shaking that hat, all the while blowing his brown jug right under your ear, until he tapped a quarter out of you. Up on the trailer, playing, the rest of us watched his hat like hunters tracking dinner, which we were.

If it was a good-time crowd, Billy would be down off the trailer a half-dozen times. Even in Christian towns, we almost always got enough for a sandwich dinner and a quart of the local ferment, if they was selling any, and gas enough to get us to the next burg.

But Tadesville was like nothing we’d ever seen.

The previous town, fifty miles west of Detroit, had been a four-tuner, our name for any place with two churches visible from the main square. Their police chief had hawk’s eyes, and he’d kept them on us closer than stink on skunk. “Divin’ Duck” was a thud, so we went right to singing down the gospel. That didn’t work either; those folks was saving their money for the next life, and Billy only shook out two dimes. We were packed and rolling by 5:30, hoping it was still early enough to hit a new town.

After an hour, though, all we’d seen was trees, lining the road so thick they choked the daylight from the sky.

“We don’t want to be running out of gas on these roads after dark,” Arnie said. Like me, he’d been watching the gas needle burrow toward the E.

I pulled over. Though we hadn’t eaten since lunch, and had only the two quarts of homemade that Whiffer, the washboard man, pinched off the back shelf in a dry goods store in Detroit -nobody groused. It wasn’t natural that there’d been no towns along the dark road, and the prospect of calming ourselves with a sip or two, even unfed, sounded fine enough for that particular moment. We stayed up late, drinking rot and telling lies, then slept as best we could, being hungry.

Late the next morning, when Arnie’s eyes cleared well enough to drive, we got going again. From the get-go, nobody spoke, and I supposed the nervousness to be testament that we was still driving through dark trees. I had no firsthand knowledge of the conditions along the road, of course, slumped as I was in the backseat, cradling my pickled head in my balled-up suit jacket, wanting only smoother roads.

After a time, Arnie slowed the car as Billy laughed with what was surely relief. I opened one eye to the white fire of the midday sun.

Tadesville looked like any other one-block bump in the road: a dinky grocery, a feed store, and a long building without a sign, all of it squatting parched on brown dirt. It didn’t have a gas station. Hell, it didn’t have cars. I closed my eye.

“Amish, Arnie,” Billy opined from the front seat. “Everybody else has cars.”

“Amish in the middle of Michigan?”

“Four-tuner,” Whiffer said from beside me.

“Better not be,” Arnie said, pulling to a stop. “We need gas.”

I turned on the seat, trying to burrow my head into the mohair upholstery.

“Look,” Whiffer said beside me, the smell of sour mash coming out of his mouth hot, like bus exhaust. “Jimcrack’s heart started up again.”

Henry Olton is my name, but with the banjo, given names get flushed quicker than beer-joint toilets. I’ve been Huskweed, Bobby Barn, Twangin’ Tom, and too many others. Jimcrack, as in Jimmy Crack Corn, was just the latest.

Arnie cut the engine. The pounding in my head pulsed louder in the quiet.

“There’s no people,” Whiffer said, after a bit.

“Amish,” Billy said from up front.

“Just working people, too busy to be laying about on an afternoon,” Arnie said. Getting out, he sent my side of the car up a hundred feet. Then he slammed the damned door, firing a red thunderbolt into my skull.

I kept my eyes shut tight and swore I’d never touch another drop. “For sure there must be people here,” Billy whispered quick to Whiffer and me in the back, but he sounded more like he was wishing than saying. “It isn’t right, not seeing towns for miles, then coming to one that’s deserted.”

Arnie’s shoes padded around slow in the dust outside the car. He was checking things out. His shoes came closer. “Got to be people here,” his voice said through the open window. “Best we just relax in the car until four thirty.”

Whiffer exhaled slowly beside me. Arnie opened the driver’s door and got back in. Mercifully, he latched it gentle.

We dozed in the afternoon heat. I been to some dead places, but Tadesville had them beat to hell. No cars, no horses pulling wagons, no people walking by. Not even the air moved.

Ordinarily, that kind of quiet made me itchy. Not that afternoon. Trying to muffle the oil derrick slamming in my head, I was appreciative.

“Four thirty,” Arnie shouted. He probably did no such thing, probably hadn’t even raised his voice, but I had not as yet healed.

The three of them scrambled out, rocking the Plymouth like a rowboat in a squall. I hugged the seat and held on.

“Jimcrack!” Arnie yelled through the window. “Showtime!”

My door got yanked open. They was going to make me die standing up.

There was no choice. Ever so gentle, I eased onto my knees and backed out of the car, presenting myself ass-first to the bright of the world. After some confusion, my feet found the dirt, and I hugged the side of the Plymouth until it, the ground, and I were all moving in concordance.

Someone set my banjo case against my leg. “Strap on, Jimcrack,” Arnie said. “Time to yodel.”

Steadying myself with the door handle, I opened my eyes just enough to ease down vertical and hoist out the banjo. Banjos have lots of metal to make them ring loud, and even in sure hands, they weigh like lead. That afternoon, I was strapping on a battleship anchor, and it took both Billy and Whiffer to pull me up onto the trailer. With my eyes again blessedly shut, I began tightening the tuners, riffing into a few simple rolls I could do in my sleep.

“If the river was whiskey, and I was a divin’ duck,” they started singing, with me croaking the base harmony, “I would dive to the bottom; I never would come up.”

Like I said, in most towns those lines were surefire to bring folks nodding and laughing. But not that afternoon. Not in Tadesville.

I opened my least painful eye to the quiet. There was nobody there but us.

“This could be a one-tune town.” Whiffer’s brushing hand fell from his washboard. “First ever.”

“Can’t happen.” Arnie eyed the empty street. “We need gas.”

He started picking “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” on his guitar and we picked it up. Plenty of towns, gospel was all that worked. We played “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” then “Amazing Grace” with a ripping banjo break by yours truly, especially considering each of my fingers was trembling at a different speed. Bedrock religious stuff, we played it loud enough to raise corpses. Billy even did his jig, jumping down and shaking around like he was summoning rain onto a drought, but we might as well have been playing in a cave. Nobody came.

Arnie set down his guitar. “We’ll have to browse.”

“Maybe everybody’s at a funeral,” I said quick, and started riffing into “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Whiffer joined in right away, rasping the rhythm hard across his washboard. He knew I hated the browsing. Arnie sighed, picked up his guitar, and strummed along, and Billy started his jumping, but it was no use. The street stayed empty.

We quit the song and looked at Arnie. He was scanning the grocery and the General Feed. Not even the white curtains in the window above the grocery fluttered.

“Easy for browsing,” Arnie said.

Browsing was stealing, and it shamed me. Truth be, we was thieves more than musicians, hunting most every town we played for small stuff-watches, jewelry, silverware-that we could slip into our pockets and hock when we got to a city.

We’d done it so much, the browsing was as smooth as our act. Arnie would wait behind the wheel of the Plymouth, key in the ignition, foot above the accelerator, while Billy, Whiffer, and I fanned out, carrying our instruments like we was trying to drum up attendance for a show. But we was looking for unwatched store counters and unlatched houses. Forty-five minutes later-timed exact, no matter what we had or hadn’t got-we’d be back to the Plymouth, Arnie would hit the gas, and we’d be gone.

Being deserted, Tadesville looked ripe, for sure.

“Jimcrack, also be checking garages for a can of gas.” Arnie looked direct into my eyeballs. He was telling me I’d better not come back empty-handed this time, even if I was only toting gasoline.

I nodded a quarter-inch and shrugged my arm through my case strap.

Billy headed for the grocery, Whiffer toward the General Feed, though what he was expecting there I didn’t bother to wonder. I walked the other way and turned the corner.

The side street was twenty degrees cooler and dark, another tunnel of trees. My liquored head was pulsing in march time from my fury and my shame. I’d honored myself fighting in Korea, yet here I was, skulking in a raggedy town, expected to steal a can of gas, a string of dime-store pearls, or a dollar watch from people too poor and too trusting to lock their doors. I stepped down the center of the road, looking neither right nor left, Arnie be damned.

“Are you greedy, banjer man?” a woman’s voice whispered, cool against my ear. My heart double-thudded as I did a quick one-eighty turn. The road stretched empty in both directions.

“Greedy like your friends?” her voice came again, a caress of silk with just a hint of the South softening her words.

I squinted into the woods. The shape of a woman, white and lacy, moved filmy in front of the dark outline of a cottage almost completely hidden in the trees.

“I don’t guess I am, ma’am,” I answered back, having the queasy certainty she knew exactly what our little jug band was up to.

She moved a couple steps closer. Her hair was black in the shadows, her lips full and dusty red. At that distance, she could have been twenty, she could have been fifty. She was beautiful.

“Then play me a tune, banjer man.”

I could have sworn her breath touched my cheek.

Without hesitating at the foolishness of standing in the road, playing to someone half-hidden in the trees, I had the five-string out and cut into “Soldiers’ Joy,” an Appalachian standard from the Revolutionary War. She laughed and started swaying with the music, a shimmer of white in the black trees. I slid into “ Turkey in the Straw,” “John Brown’s Dream,” “Ducks on the Mill Pond,” and a dozen more, one right after the other. She seemed to know them all, and danced in the woods while I played from the middle of the road.

After the last note of “Eighth of January,” she stopped sudden, put a hand on her hip, and tilted her head, poutylike. “Sure you ain’t greedy like the others, banjer man?” she called.

“I guess I’m not.” I wanted to look away, shamed by her knowing eyes.

“Greedy people is welcome for always in Tadesville,” she teased from the woods.

I shook my head. “No, ma’am.”

She paused for a minute. Then suddenly, her hand flew up, and something small arched through the trees and landed next to me on the road. “We’ll see,” she called.

I bent down and picked it up. It was a small, blue felt jewelry box. Inside was a man’s ring, green with cheap silvery plating, a gaudy chunk of cut glass set in its center.

I looked up. She was gone.

More than anything, I wanted to walk in those trees. To thank her, I told myself. To see her beauty is more the truth.

As I turned the little felt box in my hand, I caught sight of my watch. I’d been gone over an hour. Anyone back later than forty-five minutes got left behind, Arnie always said. Too risky for the rest to wait.

They’d be gone.

I dropped the little felt box into the open case, set in the banjo, and latched everything up. My head still hurt, and I felt dirtier than ever from the browsing and traveling with the likes of Arnie and the rest. But something new was trying to squeeze in between the pounding whiskey and the shame.

Relief.

A man don’t get many chances to redeem himself, the little wise part of my brain said. That voice never had spoken up much, but that evening, on that road, I heard it clear and loud.

The woods was all black now, the trees melted into each other. I picked up my banjo and walked down the road, away from the strange, deserted town, trying not to think about liquor and browsing and the wise eye of the lady in the woods.

After a couple of miles, the dirt road came to one of gravel, and a farmer in an old Ford truck with shreds of hay clinging to the flatbed picked me up in his headlights.

“Where you coming from, lugging that banjo?” he asked through the side window.

“Tadesville,” I said, looking up.

“Tadesville?” He pushed open the door. “Never heard of it.”

“Strange town,” I said, climbing up. “Nobody there, except a lady that lives off in the woods.”

The driver didn’t need to talk more, and we drove in silence through the dark until he dropped me just east of Kalamazoo.

I left the banjo at my sister’s and went to sea as an oiler, thinking to put an ocean between me and liquor and any other temptations on the road to hell. But after three years of smelling bilge on one of the foulest buckets ever to bob between New York and Liverpool, all I’d done was grow a stronger thirst for drink and a bigger taste for easy. I quit the ship and thumbed through the South, stupored on woods-stilled mash, looking to work at anything that wouldn’t raise a sweat. They wasn’t hiring drunks much at the time, and mostly I did road repairs for small jails in Alabama and Georgia. Breaking and entering, public intoxication, and bad luck was what got me those road jobs, until one incident of accomplice auto theft put me inside a prison laundry for three years.

I got out at thirty years of age, vowing to get smarter. I went to my sister’s. Though she’d been the one keeping the banjo all those years, I believe now that it was waiting of its own life force.

To save me, or to be my doom, depending.

THE world I reentered was full of amazements. Astronaut men was routinely riding rockets, cars had air-conditioning, and music was coming out of radios no bigger than a pack of smokes. Most incredible to me, though, was that the five-string banjo had become stylish. Beard-and-sandal Greenwich Village nuts had brought it up North and were treating it respectful. Suddenly, every street festival, county fair, and folk-damn hootenanny had to have a banjo player, and everybody took him serious. No banjo jokes.

I wasn’t good enough for a big act, but I didn’t need to be. There was plenty of easy work playing car dealerships and warming up county fair crowds, and I traveled with pickup groups all over the Midwest. The pay was miserable, but the hours was excellent-lots of time for sour mash and cards-and there was no need to risk thieving.

I took to wearing the ring I discovered lying in my banjo case because of the sparkle it gave off. Playing under a summer sun or on a bright-lit stage, I could sweep the glint off that ring like a beacon, starting and stopping, making the crowd laugh. It pleased every act I traveled with.

Never, though, did I wonder on the ring’s origin. Any remembrance ofTadesville and the lady in the woods had long fallen out of my mind, gone like so many of my other gin-triggered hallucinations.

Until St. Louis, June of 1964.

The mandolin player and I were in a hotel room playing stud poker with some of the locals. I’d dropped my last twenty, my flask was empty, and I was getting up to leave when one of them, a short guy in a black suit who’d been winning all night, asked me if he could see the ring. I slipped it off and handed it across the table.

Quicker than a pelican diving for lunch, he snagged a jeweler’s loupe out of his vest, popped it into his eye, and leaned back under the floor lamp. “I’ll give you a thousand bucks for it,” he said after no time at all.

I’m sure my mouth fell open. In my entire misapplied life, I’d never once been packing a thousand dollars.

“A thousand bucks. Right here, right now.” The little man leaned forward. His eyes were tiny and wet, like a ferret’s.

The table went quiet.

“Family heirloom,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t notice my hand shaking as I reached across the table for the ring, slow, giving him time to up the offer.

“Fifteen hundred.” He closed his fist around the ring.

“Not for five thousand,” I heard my voice say.

No one breathed. The mandolin player was looking at me like I’d just landed from Mars. Night after night, he’d seen me drop the ring like junk into my banjo case, giving it no thought. That night, I’d just forgotten to take it off, was all. Now he was watching me kiss off fifteen hundred solid for it.

The little man in the black suit hesitated for a long minute, then opened his hand and pushed the ring toward the center of the table. “Not worth five grand,” he said.

The wind went out of my chest. My brain screamed to say I’d been kidding; fifteen hundred was fine. But my gut said pocket the ring, get up easy, and vamoose.

And that is what I did, not at all sure what had just happened.

That one time, my gut was right. The next day, I got thirty-two hundred for the ring from a pawnbroker. I’d started downtown first, in a fancy jewelry store just off the main drag.

“Where’d you get this?” the jeweler asked, setting the ring down on the black felt counter pad.

“Family heirloom.” It still sounded reasonable to me.

“It’s four carat, clear quality, well-faceted,” he said. He eyed my greasy suit. “If you can prove ownership, I’ll give you six thousand for it.”

“For this ring?”

“For the diamond. The setting is junk.”

But he wouldn’t spring a nickel without papers, nor would the next half-dozen jewelry stores I tried. So I went to the hockshops, and got the thirty-two hundred. Not as much as the fancy stores, but it was better than a poke in the eye.

I bought a used Pontiac ragtop, white on black with red vinyl indoors, spinner hubcaps on the wheels. With the money left over, I embarked on a grand spree of black label whiskey and high stakes cards. The band, understandable, moved on, but that was no concern. I was living the high life.

I blew through the money in days. Most of it got left on card tables, and the last three hundred was beat out of me by two guys in knit hats outside a bar. I’d been shooting off my mouth, buying drinks for the room.

Stranded, broke, without prospect of a banjo job anytime soon, I started sleeping in my car.

And I started browsing.

At first I aimed for department store jewelry counters when they was at their busiest, taking care to nip only at vodka beforehand so the only thing on my breath would be the smell of Lifesaver peppermint. I acted the confused husband, torn between so many choices spread before me on the counter, figuring the clerks, mostly teenage girls, would be too eye-rollingly bored to notice a bauble missing when I told them I needed to think and turned to leave.

But whiskey had prickled my nerves. I started sprouting tremors, and that got me beady eyes from the counter clerks. And twice, serious-looking gentlemen followed me out. Both times I slipped them, but high-tone stores had lost their potential.

I aimed lower, started browsing hardware stores and bead shops. That was slow work, usually needing a whole day to boost enough to trade for a lone pint, and green goods at that.

The last day of July was inhospitable, sixty degrees and pouring gray rain. I was huddling under the eave of the train station to catch my breath after tapping the costume jewelry store across the street for a pocketful of junk. The owner had been on to me right off, but a half-dozen teenie girls had followed me in. Chattering and giggling, they swarmed the counters like bees, giving me enough cover for a quick sweep and a fast vamoose. Still, I’d been stupid, risking a grab when I knew the owner was watching, and the episode had left me shaking.

That year, black raincoats was the fashion. And in the downpour, the folks scuttling into the station looked like morticians racing to a train wreck. Except for one woman, hugging at the collar of a white coat that stood out bright against all the black ones. Dark hair, lush red mouth, she set my spine to tingling like I was leaning against needles. Brushing past, she whispered, “Greedy now, banjer man?”

It wasn’t just her mouth talking. It was the red of her lips and the white of her coat. It had been a long time since I’d remembered anything for sure, but that rainy afternoon, one memory came back sharp as the Devil’s own pitchfork.

Tadesville, 1954.

“I believe I almost am,” I thought to yell at the back of her, as she disappeared into the terminal. “I believe I almost am,” I said again, this time to myself.

People was looking at me. I hustled down to the viaduct to get away from the crowd and think.

A hallucination, I told myself. From the mash.

A vision, my other self said.

It’s been ten years, my first self said.

She could have been only twenty then, or thirty, my other self said. She’s still there, living in the woods, in a cottage full of diamonds.

That ring was the only one, my first self said. For sure, she didn’t know it was valuable, else she wouldn’t have tossed it to me for playing a few tunes. It was a fluke.

I shut down the voices. When you’re dead broke, stealing for half-pints to quell tremors, flukes take on new importance. They become likelihoods.

I came out of the viaduct into bright sunshine. The darkness and the rain were gone. I took that to be an omen, a portent, of a better day coming.

Tadesville.

THE drugstore map for Michigan showed no Tadesville, not west of Detroit or anywhere else. That made sense, being as there’d been no people there, save the woman. I pocketed the map for future use and went outside to ponder.

Problem was, I’d never known the route, because I’d been cradling my head in the backseat, caring only about the bumps Arnie wasn’t dodging.

Arnie. Arnie Norris, of Randall’s Corners, Illinois.

Approached like he was being called just for old times’ sake, he might remember the route to Tadesville.

There was a phone booth at the corner. The operator said there was a Norris listed in Randall’s Corners. I pulled my hand off the phone, having a better thought. Nudging his mind in person might be better, especially if he’d enjoyed enough good fortune since our jug band days to spot his old banjo man a twenty-money I could use for traveling. I went back to the drugstore to consult an Illinois map. Randall’s Corners was in the middle of the state, right on the way to Michigan. I made a show of putting the map back and left.

I hocked what I could, excepting the banjo, sold the spinner hubcaps at a junkyard, and headed north with the top down, serenading the telephone poles, cars, and trucks with songs of whiskey, rivers, and diving ducks.

And cottages full of diamonds.

RANDALL’S Corners looked to be suffering no prosperity. Two live souls stood jawing in front of a gas station.

“I’m looking for Arnie Norris,” I said to the one who shuffled over to the pump.

He gave me a careful look-over. “You a friend of his?”

“ Korea.”

“Arnie never came back here.”

The warmth of the gin in my gullet faded away. “How about the Norris in the phone book?”

“His brother’s son.”

I bought eighty cents worth of gas and followed his directions to Arnie’s nephew’s house. The nephew didn’t warm much to the idea that I’d served in the army with his uncle.

“You have no idea where he might be?” I asked through the screen door, clutching my hands together behind my back so as to not betray any agitation.

“He never came back here after Korea.”

I drove back to the pay phone at the gas station, trying not to panic. I’d been counting on that tap for a twenty.

I couldn’t recall where Whiffer was from, but Billy Dabbert hailed from Cedar Rapids. The operator had a number.

“Billy?” I almost shouted, much relieved, when someone answered.

“Is that you, Billy?” an ancient voice croaked back.

“I’m looking for Billy.”

“Where the hell you been all these years, Billy?” the confused voice asked.

The old gentleman was out of gray cells. I was out of dimes. I hung up. I’d have to detect the route myself.

I continued north, straining to remember what I could. We’d played a four-tuner outside of Detroit, then headed west. Low on gas, spooked by not encountering any towns, we’d stopped at sunset, drank, slept in the car. Next day, suffering the effects of the mash, I’d kept my head shrouded the whole way to Tadesville. Afterward, I’d hitched a ride from a guy driving a truck to Kalamazoo. Tadesville had to be in a line between Detroit and Kalamazoo.

It took four days to get to Ann Arbor, west of Detroit, being as I had to find gas stations crowded enough to allow a fast-exiting, nonpaying patron. Ann Arbor ’s courthouse had no record of a Tadesville, but they did have a big map showing county roads. I studied it for the route we’d likely taken, then set off westbound on skinny blacktop that wandered through towns named Bridgewater, Norvell, and Napoleon. I spent the night in the car outside Joppa. And then I came to Rasden. It had two church spires visible from the town square.

It could damned well have been that last four-tuner we’d played.

The sun climbed higher as I continued west through spindly, second-growth woods and long-abandoned farms. Then the trees got taller and thicker, until at last they twined together so thick I lost sight of the sun and the fields beyond the road.

I drove on, mindful of the drooping gas gauge and the growing thought that I could have made up the whole business about Tadesville and the lady in the woods. I’d been stupored that day, and in that condition, my mind had never been a stranger to inventing things. Maybe Tadesville was one such episode; maybe I’d browsed the ring someplace else, and my shredded brain had invented the woman so as to not remember the actual thieving.

I began to shiver. It had been hours since I’d swallowed the last of my provisions. I put the top up and turned up the heater full blast. Still I shook. Best to get out of this forsaken country, quit chasing a remembrance that never happened. I sped up, squinting ahead for a road I could take south to the interstate and, if fortune smiled, potentially a poorly tended package liquor store.

Suddenly, the cracked blacktop fell away, and I was driving on dirt, kicking back brown dust like I was fogging crops. There was a curve. The thick trees ended. And it was there, fifty yards up, baking under a full sun.

Tadesville.

And more.

I straight-armed the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes, crunching the tires deep into the dirt.

Arnie’s ’37 Plymouth was still parked at the side of the road.

The chalky blue paint was almost all weathered off, exposing huge blotches of gray primer and brown rust, and the tires had shriveled to thin black circles, but there was no doubt. It was Arnie’s car. And behind, still hitched to the bumper, was our stage trailer, piled with the tattered, rotted remains of our army-drab duffel bags.

Long needles prickle-danced up my back. I shut my eyes and squeezed the steering wheel hard. Crazy; I’d gone crazy from the mash, crazy from the gin. I wanted to giggle, but I didn’t have the courage. I begged God, to whom I had not spoken in decades: let it be a hallucination.

I opened my eyes, slow.

Arnie’s car. The trailer. Both the same.

I killed the motor.

Nothing moved in the hot, sudden silence. No cars, no people, no damned, droning flies. The air was dead, like when we’d first pulled into Tadesville.

I got out, shutting the car door easy, but still the sound boomed off the storefronts like three beats from a marching drum: the grocery, the General Feed, the long building with no name. More paint was gone from each of them, weathered away like skin flaked from a corpse too long in the desert. Above the grocery, yellow strings-remains of curtains-hung limp in the window, like entrails dangling from something dead.

My feet kicked up dirty puffs, dry as brown talcum, as I crossed the street.

The Plymouth ’s windows were down. I leaned in. Arnie’s keys and dog tags hung on a chain from the ignition. The cloth upholstery was shredded off the driver’s seat, the tops of the exposed seat springs shiny. Someone had been sitting on them recent, keeping away the rust.

My old suit jacket lay crumpled on the mildewed mohair in back, still balled up from when I’d used it as a pillow. I reached in, pulled it out. The rotted fabric came apart in my hands.

I let it fall as I went back to the trailer. My duffel was on the bottom of the pile, the stenciled “Olton” faded against the bleached army green. I undid the brass hook and pulled the putrid canvas open. My white shirts with their long, pointy collars rested on top, green-yellow now. I felt down, pulled out a pair of black gabardine slacks, a tie with a garden full of flowers, and my other suit. Everything was thick with black mold. At the bottom was a pint of Jack with two swallows left. Jesus.

I pushed it all back in the duffel, tried to wipe the black from my hands.

Run to the car. Turn the key. Get away from this place.

Once, I had the strength. Not now. Now I needed.

It was a perfect day for browsing.

I went back across the street, each step muffled by the dust, inevitable. I opened the Pontiac ’s trunk, took out the banjo case, dimly heard as the falling lid sent more drumbeats off the storefronts. At the intersection, I turned the corner. Like before, it was cooler under the thick, dark canopy of leaves. Almost cold.

I walked down the half mile.

THERE’S no meat on Arnie, Billy, and Whiffer. Their skin hangs loose and yellow, like rotting shrouds. They look like the people that came out of Auschwitz -haunted, like they’ve seen hell. My skin’s a little tighter. I haven’t had to browse as long.

We come every day about four thirty, drag what’s left of the duffels to the ground, and pull ourselves up on the trailer. We start tuning. Arnie’s only got two rusty strings left on his guitar, but it doesn’t matter. Always, we counted on Billy and Whiffer. Most folks have never seen jug and washboard.

We lead with “Divin’ Duck.” Surefire stuff, used to be. But nobody comes. Across the street, my Pontiac, white on black with red vinyl interior, sits low on rusted wheels. The tires went flat years ago, and the top is tattered from sun rot. I sleep there. I don’t know where the others sleep.

Arnie starts a banjo joke. I shuffle forward, make like I’m drooling. Nobody laughs. There’s nobody there.

We try singing down the gospel: “Swing Low,” “Go Tell It,” “Amazing Grace.” Used to draw them out, but that was in Christian towns. There’s no God in Tadesville.

Arnie sets down his guitar, makes like he’s squinting at the buildings. “We’ll have to browse.”

I start picking “Will the Circle?” but it’s for show, like before. We have to browse.

Arnie eases off the trailer, slow because there’s nothing left in his hip sockets. Clutching at the door handles, he pulls himself to the driver’s door, drops onto the seat coils. He sighs through what’s left of his teeth. He’ll wait for us behind the wheel.

Billy levers himself down with his good leg. His right leg broke years ago and healed crooked. He keeps it strapped with his belt. He hobbles for the grocery.

Whiffer goes toward the General Feed, though what he’s expecting there I don’t begin to wonder.

I latch my case, walk to the intersection, and turn down the side road. It’s always cooler there, under the leaves.

I walk down the half mile. The trees, thick and twisted, caress each other like vipers.

I know the spot. I set down the banjo.

“Are you greedy, banjer man?” The soft Southern voice brushes my skin like cold silk. It smells of mold. I cannot see her. Only the wind, moving the leaves.

I squeeze between trunks grown so thick they’ll soon touch. One hundred, two hundred yards in, I look everywhere. There is no cottage, no ruins of a foundation. Still, I move through the trees. It is my need.

The specks of yellow sun on the leaves turn orange, then gray, embers snuffing in a dying fire. I push through the bramble as fast as the arthritis and my tea bag lungs allow, screaming as the thorns rip at my scabs to get at the soft, unhealed pink underneath. There is no cottage. There never was, except as a shadow the germ beginnings of my greed needed to see.

“Greedy, banjer man?” she whispers, through the wind, through the leaves.

“You know I am, you bitch,” I yell, hell’s own supplicant. I push on.

When the last of the gray between the trees goes black, when the wind kicks up and chills the wet of my sweat and the new blood oozing out of my skin, when the shakes come so bad I can’t go on, I start to feel through the darkness for a way out. It’s almost over for another day.

Sometimes I see her then, in that last thin light. Faint, a mist, back in the woods. Laughing and swaying in the trees, mocking the weakness she has claimed at last.

I stand on the road, waiting for my raggedy breathing to regulate. I check my watch. It doesn’t work, but I know it’s been more than an hour. Arnie, Billy, and Whiffer will have gone to wherever they go. Arnie is real firm about not waiting more than forty-five minutes. I bend down, find the rope tied to the banjo case. For dragging. After the woods, I have no strength left for carrying.

I start back to town. There’s no going the other way, no finding a road to Kalamazoo. That part’s over. I’m greedy now, welcomed in Tadesville.

I always stop at the big oak where the shiny box hangs. I put it in plain view, back when I had hope that someone would come along. Back before it hit that this place was for us alone-Arnie and Whiffer and Billy and me.

And her. Especially, her.

I feel inside for the paper-this paper-and know again the little death as my fingers close around it. Nobody will come.

I give the twine a tug to make sure the string is still taut and then head back to the Pontiac, dragging my banjo, taking what comfort I can summon from the spongy, dark places on my skin and the lump the size of a walnut that’s growing on my forehead.

I tell myself it will end soon, when the spongy places and the walnut ripen. That nothing will come after, except peace.

It can’t last forever, I say to the dark.

Sure as hell.