Ain’t You ’Most Done?

THE HOT-PINK DRAGSTER HAD NOT moved in a minute and a half. It seemed like five; but Benson was careful and accurate in all matters involving time, and it had been one minute and a half. He shifted the transmission into Park and took his foot off the brake. One and a half minutes—ninety seconds—was a long time. In ninety seconds flat, no more, a skilled man in one of the company’s seventeen hundred Magus Muffler and Brake Shops could prep a car for the installation of a new tailpipe, a new exhaust pipe, and a brand-new Magus Muffler—copper, nickel, and chrome plated in successive layers and guaranteed for as long as the customer retained title to the car on which it was installed.

In seven more seconds, the time would be two minutes.

A small carrying case on the rear seat held sixty-four of his favorite compact discs. Benson reached in back for it, got it, and opened it, removing a collection of nineteenth-century sea songs.

The dragster’s brake lights faded, and he shifted his car into Drive. He had counted on an hour, possibly an hour and a half, at his office before the helicopter that would fly him to the airport arrived. Now he would be lucky to get ten minutes. The dragster crawled forward, and his car with it; when both stopped again, they had traversed perhaps fifty feet.

He returned the transmission to Park and put the CD into the dashboard player. His back and neck hurt, presumably from the tension induced by this endless delay, and the pain was creeping down both arms. He would have to learn to relax.

Benson could play that himself, and sing it, too. Play and sing it pretty well, not that anybody cared. He pictured himself seated on the tarred hatch cover of a transatlantic packet with his guitar on his lap and a villainous black stogie smoldering between thumb and forefinger, ringed by delighted sailors and passengers.

The brake lights of the dragster glowed as obstinately red as ever. Wouldn’t that fool kid ever make it easy on himself? Benson let his head loll to one side, then the other, rolling it upon his shoulders.

If things had gone differently, perhaps he, too, would be making CDs and giving concerts, appearing occasionally on TV, consulted by authorities on folk music who would want to know where he had learned this song or that and from whom he had learned it: seamen’s songs and rivermen’s songs, songs sung by lumberjacks and Civil War soldiers.

He was making ten times more than he could possibly have made like that, but money wasn’t everything; in fact, once you had food and clothes, a warm place to sleep, and a few hundred pocket money, more money meant very little.

One of the dragster’s brake lights had gone out, or perhaps the two had flowed together, condensing into a single cyclops light belonging to a newer car. Sweat trickled down Benson’s forehead into his eyes. The air-conditioning was already set on Max, but he moved the fan control up to High, conscious of increased pain under his breastbone where his stomach joined the esophagus. Acid indigestion. He tried to recall what he had eaten for breakfast. Ham? No, the ham had been on Sunday.

Benson blinked and closed his eyes, and after one hundred and twenty-three seconds blinked a second time, aware of weakness and pain. He lay on his back; something had been thrust into both nostrils; the ceiling was off-white and very remote.

Wires clung to him like leeches.

After a time that was neither long nor short so far as he was concerned, a nurse appeared at his side. “You had a close call,” she said.

He was not sure what she meant. It seemed best to keep quiet.

“You’re awake, aren’t you, Mister Benson?” She looked at him more closely. “This is real. You’re not dreaming.”

He managed to say, “I never dream.”

“Really?” She turned to scrutinize what appeared to be an oscilloscope.

“I daydream. Of course.” He tried to smile, although he was aware that she was not looking at him. “Much too much, I’m afraid …” Talking was no longer worth the effort.

Still not looking at him, but not looking now (he thought) so that she would not have to see his expression, the nurse said, “You’ve had a heart attack, a bad one. Probably you’ve already figured that out for yourself.”

“It seemed the most likely explanation.” Privately, he was relieved. It was better to know the truth, to be sure. People survived heart attacks and lived for years. Decades in some cases.

“But you’ve come through it.” The nurse turned to face him. “You’re going to be all right.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re a very important man.”

Under the circumstances, that seemed humorous. Smiling took little effort this time.

“We’ve had all sorts of people phoning and trying to get in to see you.”

He could easily imagine what it had been like. He said, “I apologize.”

“Oh, it’s okay, we’re used to it. But for the present, only family members, and no calls. It’s for your own good.”

She bustled away, stopping in the doorway to ask, “You really don’t dream? Ever?”

“No,” he murmured. He tried to make his voice stronger, strong enough to carry to her. “Not even when I was a child. I can’t imagine what it’s like, to tell you the truth.”

She regarded him skeptically.

“Like hallucinating, I suppose.” He had not thought of this before. “But I’ve never done that either.”

“Everyone dreams, Mister Benson. It’s just that sometimes the unconscious mind tells us forget, cuts us off from it.”

I don’t, he said, but the words never reached his lips—she had left too fast.

If she was right, he reflected, somewhere in his memory there was a vast reservoir of unremembered dreams; he searched for it, but it was not there.

A touch woke him. The same nurse was bending over his bed. “Mister Benson?”

He blinked. “Would you do me a favor, Nurse? A great favor?”

That surprised her. “Certainly, if I can.”

“Call me Tim.”

Involuntarily, she glanced at the door. “It says Otis Benson. That’s the name we have you down under.”

It brought back a book that Michael had liked when Michael was young. Benson told her, “Winnie the Pooh lived in a hollow tree in the woods under the name Sanders.” It was easy to smile now. “Or at least, I think it was Sanders.”

She smiled too. “That’s right. I read that to my little nephew.”

“I,” he tried to clear his throat, “on the other hand, have lived under the name Otis Benson. My real name is Timothy Otis Benson. I dropped the Timothy a long time ago.”

“I see.” As though unsure what to say, she added, “My name’s Ruth. You can call me that if you want to, Tim.”

“I will, Ruth. My mother called me Tim. Tiny Tim. I’d like to be Tim again.”

“I understand. Tim, your daughter’s here to see you. I said I’d see if you were strong enough. Are you? We won’t let her stay long.”

Benson, who had no daughter, said, “Of course I am. Send her in,” and watched the doorway with some interest after the nurse had gone.

It was Daisy, and before she came in he had discovered an armless chair of enameled metal beside his bed. As he tried to decide whether the sorrow in her face was genuine he said, “I thought it was you. Won’t you sit down?”

She did, knees primly together, hands folded in the lap her salient chest clearly prevented her from seeing. After a second or two, it occurred to him that she was dressed for the office, and he asked her what time it was.

She raised her left hand to consult the diamond-studded watch he had given her. “Seven o’clock.”

“In the evening?”

She nodded. “We didn’t hear until three—after three. I left when I heard. I left everything in an awful mess, but I left. I told Susan to—to take care of things, and I left. The traffic was terrible.”

He said, “I remember.” A tall, pale-faced man in black had entered without making a sound. An orderly of some sort, Benson thought, although he did not look like an orderly.

“You were there in your car for more than an hour—this is what they said on the radio—while the traffic crawled around you. I listened while I drove over here, while I was stuck in traffic.”

And cried, as Benson saw. Her eyes were red, but it was probably better to pretend he had not noticed. He had always been angry when Daisy cried, never imagining that someday she might cry for him.

“People had been calling on their car phones to complain. They said there was an abandoned car, and finally a tow truck got there, and the driver called an ambulance.”

She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “I guess they drove on the shoulder when they could. That’s the way they do, but it still took a long, long time. A terribly long time. Then it was the president and CEO of Magus, Otis Benson. And when I heard I thought, I thought …”

“You thought what?” He was genuinely curious, and sensed that she would tell him the truth now.

“I thought, I don’t care what anybody says, I’m going, and I’m going to wear black, everything black and a veil.” For an instant, her reddened eyes flashed. “Then I thought, nobody will say anything. The loyal secretary coming to the boss’s funeral, how nice. Mister Wilson will pat me on the shoulder. I know he will.” Her voice rose to a wail. “Oh, Benny! Don’t die. Please don’t die!”

She should not have called him Benny in the presence of the silent man in black, but Benson could not bring himself to rebuke her. “I won’t,” he said. “I won’t.” His groping hand found hers.

The prettiest secretary in the company, and when he had reached the top he had taken her, although she was by no means the best secretary or the best typist. She had been a badge, a trophy, letting everybody know that he was in charge, that the Board was in his pocket, that what he said went, and there had better be no arguments and no footdragging—one trophy among a great many. Susan, who had been his secretary when he was first vice-president and sales manager, became his executive assistant at twice her old salary, handling everything tricky, confidential, or sensitive. Daisy had typed a few letters and memos, had brought him coffee and emptied the ashtrays, and opened the mail each morning.

And then—

“So I showed them my fake ID that says Daisy Benson,” she was saying, “and they let me come up.”

He managed to nod. She had that odd old-fashioned streak, worrying about hotels that had ceased to worry about couples fifty years ago, wearing gloves in the lobby or slipping the star sapphire he had given her onto the ring finger of her left hand. Lying in the hospital bed and only half hearing her, he understood for the first time that she had found satisfaction in that, had liked to think of the sapphire ring as a wedding ring, had fantasized about it. She was still talking, but he interrupted her. “What kind of a ceremony do you want, Daisy?”

“You mean your … ?” She stared blankly, the pinkish lids of her wide, bloodshot eyes moving slowly down, and slowly up again. “What?”

“What kind of wedding? You must have thought about it. What kind would you like?”

“We didn’t have a real wedding.”

For a moment he actually thought that she meant the two of them, that she was reminding him of something he had forgotten.

“Just at the courthouse.”

The nurse appeared in the doorway. “You’ll have to leave now, Miss Benson.”

Reluctantly Daisy rose, letting go of his hand. “At the Consort. Please?”

“All right,” he told her. “Soon as I get out of here.”

She blew him a kiss from the doorway, and he smiled and shut his eyes. He had wanted to keep Michael’s estate safe for him, had wanted to avoid the entanglements of a divorce he had considered only too likely. All of that seemed childish now. Perhaps she really loved him—perhaps she didn’t. He loved her, and that was what mattered.

When he opened his eyes again, the tall man in black was standing over him. He had the whitest face Benson had ever seen—so white that he seemed practically transparent. “I’m awake,” Benson told him.

“I know you are.”

“What is it you want? Do you have to change the bed or something?”

“You have been wronged.” The man in black spoke slowly, in a loud whisper. “You would say shortchanged. I have come to set things right.”

Benson shut his eyes again. No doubt he was entitled to some hospital amenity that he was not receiving, a TV in his room or an evening snack.

“You have never dreamed.”

He had told someone about it not long ago; perhaps it had been this tall man in black. The darkness he saw with his eyes closed was the tall man’s black clothing. He had never known it, yet it did not seem strange.

Far off, in a palace beyond the universe, the man in black said, “You will dream now, Timothy Otis Benson, for as long as may be.”

He sat up. He had lain down, apparently, on the front seat of his car. Drunk? He hadn’t been drunk since college.

Something fell from the seat with a melodious clang, and he bent to pick it up.

It looked like a guitar yet unlike one too, a tinny affair someone with more skill than sense had made from one of his mufflers and a section of tailpipe, guitar-like but given the S-shaped sound holes of a violin.

Turning it over, he verified that it was in fact (as he had supposed from the first moment he saw it) made from a Magus muffler; Magus’s clouded moon was stamped boldly on what was now the back, although the trade name itself, which should have appeared there in capital letters, was missing.

As were the sensuous curves of a real guitar, or for that matter a real violin. This—his questing thumb woke a chord from the five silver strings—was as plain and straight-sided as any prepubescent girl.

How did the song go?

He had meant only to mutter the words, but their old magic overcame him at once; his voice echoed from the windows and the windshield, in some fashion transmuted to mellow gold.

Benson grinned as he ducked beneath the Magus-guitar’s thin strap. Could you really play this thing?

He had never played, never sung, half so well; moved by innocent vanity, he looked around to see whether anyone had been listening.

Cars, trucks, and buses surrounded him, motionless in the slanting rays of a brighter sun. No brake light glowed crimson now, no exhaust fouled the clear air.

Here in his car that air was warm and musty, and growing warmer. He depressed a switch in the armrest to put down his window, but the glass remained where it was. Turning the key kindled no instrument lights, woke no sleeping tiger in the engine.

He opened the door and got out. Morning was fresh and beautiful, and ghostly in its silence save for the barking of a small dog far off. A jet-black cat with eyes like emeralds blinked at him, spat, and retreated beneath a rusty minivan.

Before and behind him, the sixteen lanes of Interstate 75 stretched as far as he could see, eight north, eight south. Every lane was filled, and every bumper touched another.

He turned back, remembering that he had left his key in the ignition; but he had locked the door behind him, or it had locked itself. There were no keys in the pockets of the worn workpants he wore, no money, no driver’s license, no credit cards, and no handkerchief.

He had not meant to play, but the low-down blues notes stole out of the Magus-guitar, possessed by a will of their own.

The door of a station wagon several cars up the lane swung open and a sleepy-eyed woman in a threadbare housedress got out. Thinking she might be offended, he switched songs.

“Woke up this mornin’ with the blues ’round my bed.
Yep, woke up this mornin’ with blues ’round my bed.
Went to eat breakfast, got blues in my bread.”

The woman called “You hungry?” and started toward him.
“Good mornin’, Blues, how d’ye do?
Good mornin’, Blues, how d’ye do?
Feelin’ good, Partner. How ’bout you?”

Nearer now, the woman repeated, “You hungry?”

Benson shook his head.

“We got a few little somethings left over from last night. The chowchopper come last night.”

“I’m really not hungry,” Benson told her. “I just hope my singing didn’t disturb you.”

The woman smiled, and at once the smile made her younger and almost attractive. “I was just layin’ there in our car awake, thinkin’. You sure can sing. I never heard nobody on the radio better’n what you are. Not near as good.”

“Thank you,” Benson said.

“They don’ play music much, and ain’t good when they do. Maybe you’d play me just one song?”

“If it won’t wake people up.”

Another car door opened; the man who got out said, “Go ahead. Nobody’s goin’ to complain.”

“A love song,” the woman said, and Benson nodded.

By the time the song was finished, there were ten or more ragged people around him, some awed, many smiling. Someone shouted, “Another song!,” seconded at once by the woman: “Play another one, won’t you?”

Benson winked at the nearest man and began it.

“I’m a lonely bushwhacker on the Reed County Line,
I can lick any bastard, yokes one ox o’ mine.
If ever I catch him, you bet that I’ll try,
I’ll lick him with the oxbow,
Root, hog, or die!

“Git out upon that lonely road,
Crack your whip ’n haul your load,
Whip ’em, boys, and holler,
Yell and cuss ’em ’til you’re dry,
It’s whack them cattle on, boys.
Root, hog, or die!”

Benson glanced around him. He had fifty listeners now, perhaps a hundred. As he launched into the third verse, he told himself firmly that he should play no more than three songs for them. It was better—far better—to get offstage while you were still welcome, still being applauded with honest enthusiasm. He would count “Strawberry Lane” as the first, this as the second.

“Sing another like that ’un!” a man in the crowd called when he had finished.

Benson shook his head. “There are no more like that.”

“Sing a good one,” the man he had winked at said. “You know what you got.”

“Shenando’” seemed the only possible choice. He began to walk before he finished the first verse, afraid at first that they would follow him, and fearful that they would not.

And when the last was sung, and the last of those who had had dropped behind him, the Magus-guitar sang still, murmuring the haunting melody of the wooded Eastern river and the cruel, hot, Western flood men had once called the Big Muddy, a mile wide and an inch deep, too thick to drink and too thin to plow, relentlessly rolling to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Where are you goin’, mister?” a boy shouted.

“Moving on,” Benson told him, and sang “The Wayfaring Stranger” for him, and then walked on as he had promised.

Where was he going, and where had he been? Once he had sold franchises for a company that was to all intents and purposes a fraud. Bit by bit, he had made the thing real, providing the training that had been promised, upgrading the cheap and sleazy replacement parts, arranging—it had been his one stroke of genius—to sell stock to the franchisees, and welding them, his people, into the force with which he had seized control.

It seemed a very long time ago, something he had worried about once but need worry about no longer. For a moment he paused to study his reflection in the window of a big, black, limo-like vehicle, a window cleaner than most.

He looked as he had always supposed himself to look. A tickle from the back of his mind reminded him, for a moment only, that of late he had not looked like that—had been shocked, in fact, each time he saw his own face in a mirror. He turned away, and the tickle ceased.

He was going to marry somebody again, marry a woman he loved, he felt sure, though he could not lay hand to her name at the moment. She would be pleased, whoever she was, to see him looking so young. Or anyway to see him no longer looking old.

“Can you play that thing?” a man much younger than he asked.

Benson nodded. “I’ll play you a song, and sing it too, if you’ll stroll along with me.”

The young man hesitated, then grinned. “One song? That shouldn’t be very far. They can’t get too mad if you just walk for one song.”

“Ah,” Benson said, wondering who “they” were.

“’Sides, if you play like most others I’ve heard, one song ought to be enough. Maybe too much.”

“This is the way I play,” Benson told him, and his fingers (almost carelessly, it seemed to him) called forth the melody of “Londonderry Air.”

“Say,” the young man croaked when the last note had faded, “you’re good. You’re real good.” He sounded almost reverent.

“Thank you,” Benson said. “It’s a good tune, though. So good that some have called it the most beautiful ever written. It’s hard to go wrong with a tune like that if you can play it at all.”

“You said you’d sing, though. You didn’t sing.”

“That was before you implied that the way I played one song would be more than enough,” Benson explained. “Since it was my playing you’d questioned, I let you hear that. Nothing compels me to sing for people who don’t like my music.”

“Are you going to sing now?” the young man asked. “I’ll come along.”

“No,” Benson told him, and walked on, a little upset with himself at first, but soon feeling oddly at peace.

He had walked two miles if not more before he understood the feeling. He was at peace because he had been given what, in the depths of his soul, he had always wanted. It was an article of faith with many people that what one wants is never enough when one achieves it.

But that was only because so many—himself included—enjoyed the chase, the struggle, the pursuit of some distant goal. Mountain climbers, when they had at length conquered the peak that had frustrated their efforts for months or years, went looking for more difficult heights. Not because they were insatiable, but because they enjoyed pitting their courage and their skills against Nature.

He had liked pitting himself against Business, had liked being more duplicitous than the crooks, cheating them as they had cheated others, enjoyed beating the corporate politicians at corporate politics—then striking down those who tried to play politics with him.

All that was true; but underneath it, he had longed for this, had longed to be a simple man living among simple people, seeing their faces glow when he sang the old songs. He had been in a hospital; he was quite sure that he remembered that. Someone must have given him this to cure him.

As it had.

The persistent whick-whick-whick of a helicopter sounded in the distance. It drew scores of people from cars to look at it, and point, and shout to one another. Benson stopped to look, too, shading his eyes with his hand. It was a big one, as large as the largest military helicopter he had ever seen, but slate blue or blue-gray, not the desert camouflage of the United States Army.

It slowed as it passed overhead, then settled, almost but not quite landing. Men ran to it, queuing up to form a line that soon stretched twenty or thirty yards between the motionless lines of rusty cars and trucks. Benson joined them.

Glancing behind him, he saw hundreds of women and children falling into line in back of the men. A barefoot young woman, a lanky blonde of perhaps seventeen, dashed past him and was admitted to the line by a young man who might profitably have pursued a career in professional football. There was a rumble of complaint, soon stilled.

“Should be eggs today,” the man standing behind Benson said happily.

Benson nodded his agreement. Far ahead, flat white boxes about eight inches by eight were being passed out by the crew of the helicopter, together with … He strained his eyes.

Men who had been at the front of the line were drifting back now, some eating from the flat boxes they carried, more drinking from clear, squat bottles that were distorted by the pressure of their fingers.

“Hope we get there ’fore the water runs out,” the man behind Benson said.

“I’d like a nice drink of water myself,” Benson admitted.

“They ought to take as many waters as crackerboxes,” the man continued bitterly. “They never do. Water’s cheaper, too, only they don’t like to bring it.”

“It’s heavier, I imagine,” Benson said.

The man ahead of him turned to stare back at him. “What’s that got to do with it? It’s just water.”

“Weight limits the amount of cargo that a helicopter can carry,” Benson explained. “The size of the fuselage is just a matter of convenience, really. Capacity is determined by the power of the engines and the configurations of the rotors.”

The man behind him asked, “You from hereabouts?”

“From this city?” For a half a second, Benson considered. “Why, yes, I suppose I am. At least—”

The fist of the man behind him caught him just below the ribs, sending him staggering forward. Something struck the side of his head, and something else, presumably a kick, the side of one knee. He fell, dropping the Magus-guitar. Shoed and booted feet attacked him like a flock of birds. He rolled, covering his head with his arms, his legs drawn up to protect his belly.

Someone sprawled on top of him. He gasped and struggled before realizing that the body above his was not that of a new attacker. Overhead, in the lofty space occupied by those who still stood, a woman said, “Don’t get him,” and a man: “That’s enough! Hold on!”

The protecting body vanished. Benson coughed and spat, wondering how badly he had been hurt. There was no blood in his spittle—or if there was, the dust in his eyes kept him from seeing it.

They were still talking above his head. A new voice, a boy’s or a very young man’s, said, “I guess he didn’t know. I ought to have told him.” Was that the young man for whom he had played “Londonderry Air”? Benson tried to get to his feet, and succeeded in getting to his knees.

Someone nudged his arm with a booted foot, saying, “You. Get up.”

He did, finding that he could stand although his legs were shaky.

“You get back there to the end.” It was the hulking young man who had allowed the lanky blonde to join him in line.

Benson nodded, still too dazed to speak. Magically, it seemed, the Magus-guitar was in his hands as before.

“Come on.” This was a new young man, short and slight. “You made that out of a muffler, didn’t you?”

Benson cleared his throat and spat again.

“I never seen one like that.”

He managed to nod. “A replacement muffler.” He came very near to adding that it was one of his, one of his company’s. He really had made that muffler, in a sense, although not as an instrument.

“You cut those fancy holes with a li’l file? There’s a man by us had a file.” The young man himself was grasping what seemed to be a hubcap with a dozen wires strung across it, a rude harp or lyre.

Benson contrived to say something suitable.

“It get busted? I’d like to hear it.”

Dusting his hands, he spat again. “I owe you a lot more than that.” He offered to shake hands, conscious that his own was soiled, but conscious too that the one it would be shaking would be soiled at least as badly. “I’m Tim Benson.”

The young man’s hand was small, but surprisingly hard and muscular. “Aldo Berry. We both of us play, an’ we both got names with a B.”

They had come to the end of the line, the place marked by a bedraggled child who said, “You won’t neither get nothin’. Me neither.” Her small face was sad and resigned.

“What’s your name?” Benson asked her. “You know ours, if you were listening. I’m Tim and he’s Aldo. Who are you?”

“B’neice.”

“How old are you, B’neice?”

“Ber-nice!”

Benson was so involved with his thoughts that he scarcely heard her. This young man, Aldo, was presumably a musician of some kind; that explained his rushing to the aid of a stranger—the age-old sympathy of one performer for another. And now his rescuer wanted him to play.

Unbidden, his fingers caressed the strings, evoking for perhaps the millionth time since its composition the old Irish melody.

Aldo opened his mouth to speak, gulped, stammered, and at last managed to say, “You got to learn me.”

Benson sighed. Had he ever been this young? Yes. Yes, of course. He tried to say that he had very little of value to teach anyone—that what he really needed was courage like the boy’s own, adding, “You play and sing yourself, don’t you? You implied a moment ago that you did.”

Aldo nodded hesitantly, accepting a limp slice of bacon from one of the men “The Minstrel Boy” had attracted.

“May I try your instrument? You may try mine, if you like.”

The exchange completed, Benson ran his fingertips across Aldo’s strings; A-sharp was a shade flat, and he tightened it. Someone handed him a pastry dotted with nutmeats; to free his hands, he gave it to the child.

He had never so much as touched even a modern harp, and he remembered reading somewhere that it was the most difficult of all the stringed instruments; this primitive harp of Aldo’s, with its very limited range, should be much easier—more like a mandolin than a modern pedal harp. The question was whether even an approximation of real music could be coaxed from it.

The opening notes of “Shenando’” sounded thin and poor. He would have to reinforce them with their harmonics, plainly, and fill between them like a jazz pianist.

He tried again.

Still pretty bad. He made a third attempt, at first only half singing the lyric.

This time a chance-caught spell among the dancing, tinny notes showed him the river as the composer of that song had seen it, the enchanted gateway to freedom, to adventure and riches, a call stronger than home or honor or any woman. Like the river itself, the song carried everything before it.

There were deafening cheers, applause greater than he had ever imagined in his most self-indulgent moments.

Later, as they walked beside a motionless Greyhound bus, Aldo offered him a slab of flatbread. He took it and nibbled tentatively, troubled by the feeling that once he had eaten in this strange place he would become as desperately hungry as the rest of its inhabitants.

“Don’t bite down hard,” Aldo warned him, “’less you got good teeth.”

Swallowing the morsel he had succeeded in gnawing free, Benson ventured a remark about saliva softening it.

“Or water, if you got a bottle.” Aldo appeared troubled; by silence, Benson encouraged him to speak.

“There’s the offroad way an’ then there’s the free way, Tim. We’re the freewayers, but you’re a offroader, ain’t you? I won’t tell.”

They talked about that for a time—not about the world beyond Interstate 75, in which Aldo seemed to have very little interest, but about the freewayers, the people like Aldo himself, squatters who lived in their cars waiting for the hand-drawn carts that brought them gasoline, compressed air, and sometimes water, and for the helicopters that brought food and clothing. “It’s your clothes,” Aldo told him, “offroader clothes. You turn them in, Ma’am said, to churches an’ things, an’ they pick them up an’ put them in the slopchopper, an’ then throw them down for us.”

As Benson tried to grasp the twin horrors of poverty and idleness, Aldo explained, “Ma’am was my ma. Can I tell you ’bout her? You might make a song ’bout her, an’ it’d make her proud if she knew.”

Benson had tried to write songs of his own many times, never with success. New folk song, where he was concerned at least, was an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Aldo looked incredulous when he explained that, so Benson asked whether he himself composed the songs he sang.

Aldo nodded, solemn as if they were deciding an issue of life and death. “That’s why I’m goin’ to the Spaghetti Bowl. I’ll get a new one there, but I can’t say how I know it. I just do. The songs you sang back there where the chowchopper was? Didn’t you make them up?”

Benson shook his head, and spoke (more openly than he ever had to anyone before) of the pleasure folk music had given him, and of his own fruitless efforts to compose folk songs. When he felt that he could stand the pain of self-revelation no longer, he returned the rude harp. “Sing me one of your songs, please, Aldo. A song you made yourself.”

“Here’s yours,” Aldo said, and returned the Magus-guitar. “This’s about my ma.” He cleared his throat and strummed his rude harp.

“It’s not a very good song,” he said when it was finished, “an’ that’s all the farther I ever got, an’ now she’s drove out.” As though seeing that Benson had not understood him, he added, “Dead, it means.”

After that, they talked of Aldo’s mother and a sweetheart he seemed not entirely sure was his until he sprinted away to the spot beyond the outer lane where a yellow helicopter was landing.

Benson followed more sedately, wondering what had caused such excitement; the yellow helicopter appeared to be a four-seater, and was certainly too small to carry much cargo.

When he reached the place where it had set down, a tall and professionally personable young woman in a tailored blue jumpsuit was addressing a microphone for the benefit of a video recorder.

Aldo nudged him. “See what she’s got, Tim? Ma’am had a thing like that what she’s talkin’ into, only there wasn’t nowhere to plug it in.”

Benson nodded, giving most of his attention to the young woman in the blue jumpsuit.

“We’re here to look for very special artists we can put on our program,” the young woman’s amplified voice announced to the crowd. “But it has to be something visual, basically. You have to make things that we can show, or do something we can show you doing. So if there’s anyone here like that, I hope that he or she will step forward.”

Benson watched Aldo, half expecting him to volunteer; but he did not.

The young woman in the blue jumpsuit spoke glowingly of the future that she and her station offered, and a voice from the crowd called, “There’s somebody back at the chowchopper that sings real good.”

“That’s you,” Aldo whispered.

Nearer now, the young woman pointed to Aldo’s rude harp. “What’s that you’ve got? Our other crew discovered a girl last night who had something like that.”

Aldo held it up. “Was her name Mar’?”

Mar’, Benson remembered, was Aldo’s sweetheart. He said, “Sing for them, Aldo. They want to hear you, and so do I.”

The young woman in the blue jumpsuit had gotten a grip on Aldo’s arm. She drew him nearer the handheld video recorder. Aldo resisted at first, then grinned at her.

It was a good, rollicking song, and Benson applauded as loudly as anyone when it was done.

“And you, sir,” the young woman in the blue jumpsuit said, “what’s your name?”

Until two men pushed him forward, Benson believed that she was addressing someone else.

“What’s your name?” she repeated.

He did not belong in this nightmarish traffic jam, was not what Aldo would have called a freewayer—or perhaps he was. He had awakened in a stopped car, after all. Would very likely be there now, if he had not locked himself out of it and set off with some vague notion of exploring, of finding someone who would help him retrieve them without breaking a window.

“Will you play for us, Tim? We’d like to hear you.” He had not been conscious of giving the young woman his name, but perhaps he had. He shook his head.

“Go ’head, Tim,” Aldo said. And to the others, “He’s so fine! Wait till you hear.”

He had played “Londonderry Air” only an hour or two ago, and there was a haunting song, “My Gentle Harp,” set to the music.

Almost before he knew that he had begun to play, he was concluding the first verse, singing, yet hearing his own voice soar above the crowd as though it were another’s. How envious he would have been of that voice, so vibrant with sorrow and majesty, had it not been his own!

That was enough, surely—time to retreat into the crowd, to become one of them again. Benson looked at the circle of starved and dirty faces, at the open mouths and awed eyes of a hundred men and women who had never—until now—heard music that touched their souls, and launched into the second verse.

Only when the closing notes had ascended to the clear sky from which the yellow helicopter had dropped did he entirely comprehend how well that old song accorded with the freewayers’ plight. Looking at them, he knew that they had known almost as soon as he had begun.

The young woman in the blue jumpsuit, who clearly had not, said, “That was—was just so wonderful, Tim, but won’t you play something about this mess? This traffic jam that’s kept so many of you here so long? That’s what they want to hear, back at our building.”

Speaking more to himself than to her, Benson said, “I’d like to go with you. That’s been my dream, to sing folk music and be a star. But I don’t know any. Only one, actually.”

She gave him a professionally charming smile. “Then sing that.”

He asked Aldo’s permission and received it, then began Aldo’s song about his mother, certain that it would mark the end of the opportunity he had so long feared and desired. What dream would remain for him, when this one was gone?

That was what the young woman in the blue jumpsuit wanted, of course: something that actually employed the words traffic jam. And whatever its other defects, this did.

How had she felt, Aldo’s mother, confined to this sixteen-lane hell until death came for her? How had she felt, this no doubt personable, determined, and talented woman whom he would never meet?

Benson struggled to keep the pity he felt from his voice—and, appalled, heard it issue from the Magus-guitar, at once sorrowing and raging.

The last notes died while Benson was still wondering what good those prayers had ever done Ma’am—or her son Aldo, for that matter.

The young woman had his right arm and her cameraman his left. He ducked under a whizzing rotor blade and found himself pushed into a seat behind the two front seats of the yellow helicopter. The door shut, and in a moment the young woman was in the seat beside the pilot, and the cameraman in the seat beside his own. The helicopter rose, seeming almost to float up like a balloon.

Over her shoulder, the young woman said, “I want you for the noon news, Tim. With a little luck we ought to be able to make it.” She glanced at her wrist, then back to him. “It’s ten-twenty. That’s an hour and forty minutes to get you there and get you made up. Should be fine.”

The cameraman said, “What about clothes?” It was the first time that Benson had heard him speak.

“I want them to see what he wore in the jam, the first time. Tim, I bet you’re wondering when you’ll get to live at the Consort-Hilton and do all that shopping I talked about.”

He had been wondering no such thing.

“We’re going to put you on the eleven o’clock too. Maybe on the four-thirty if you really go over at noon and nothing big’s breaking. After that, we’re going to save you for the People You Should Meet show Sunday afternoon—three or four songs and an interview. Today’s Grunday, so that’ll give you five whole days, and afterward we’ll see. It could be longer.”

Benson asked, “What day did you say it was?”

The cameraman answered for her. “Grunday.”

They were banking, high above the tallest buildings in the city. Far below, obscured by haze, Interstate 75 might well have been locked in any ordinary rush-hour traffic jam.

Benson swallowed, and swallowed again as the helicopter began to descend—far too quickly, it seemed to him. In front, the pilot appeared unconcerned, and the young woman in the blue jumpsuit was whispering into a handheld microphone; on his right, the cameraman was unwrapping a stick of gum.

Benson gripped the armrest and his seat belt. Grunday. Where was he? Where in the world was he, anyway?

The yellow helicopter landed with a slight thump on the tarred roof of an office tower, and before he could catch his breath a short, bouncy, round-faced woman with carroty curls opened his door. “I’m Jennifer,” she said. “You’re Tim? Come on.”

He fumbled with the buckle of his safety belt and stooped as he got out. A head shorter than he, Jennifer stood bolt upright, still grinning as she pulled him along. “I’ve got to take you to your dressing room. It’s not far.”

What looked like a rooftop shed held an elevator in which the young woman in the blue jumpsuit and the cameraman were already waiting. Its doors closed and it fell from under him the moment Benson entered.

I’m seeing this as a real folksinger would, he thought, a backwoodsman brought to the city like this for the first time—even the familiar is new and terrifying.

His ears popped.

“Here we are,” Jennifer announced. Doors slid open, and she and Benson stepped out. “My name’s Jennifer, and I’m a page. Did I tell you that?”

Benson gulped and forced himself to say something. “Your name. Jennifer. You told me that up there.”

“Well, I’m a page.” Jennifer indicated the simple blue frock she wore. “Really I’m a summer intern. I’ll get my master’s in communications in two years. Come on.”

Benson did, trying to recall one of Michael’s books in which people were forever saying come on. Was he about to meet the Mock Turtle? The Mock Turtle would be reassuringly familiar after all this.

“Anybody who’s got one of these blue dresses is a page,” Jennifer explained, “except the guys. Guys have blue slacks and blue shirts. Same thing.”

“All right.”

“Ask us anything. Want a Pepsi? I’ll bring it. Here’s your dressing room.” She opened a narrow green door.

“A glass of ice water,” Benson told her as firmly as he could.

“Is that all?”

“A large glass of ice water.”

“You’ll have it in a nanosecond. Only go in your dressing room, okay? And stay there. Makeup will be in. Somebody’ll come for you at airtime, probably me.”

“All right,” he said again, and found himself in a small room containing a couch, a stool, a dressing table, a mirror ringed by lights, and very little else.

He sat down on the couch and looked at the Magus-guitar. He had no memory whatsoever of having had it on the helicopter, yet here it was, still suspended from his neck by its narrow strap. He had carried it and failed to notice it, or it had dematerialized when he finished Aldo’s song and rematerialized here. At the moment, those alternatives seemed equally likely.

The door opened, and a young man wearing black slacks, a white shirt, and a deplorable necktie set a tumbler of ice water on the dressing table, saying, “Jenny said you wanted this.”

“I did,” Benson began. “Thank—”

The door slammed shut.

Shrugging, he picked up the tumbler and began to drink. What had been in the bottles the chowchopper had passed out? Tap water, presumably. Not even cold, since there had been no condensation on the thin plastic.

He sighed, suddenly conscious that he was terribly tired. They would want him to play the song about Aldo’s mother; the lyric had stuck in his mind, and the melody was so simple that he had improved it considerably, extemporizing as he played. What about the later broadcasts? They wouldn’t want him to repeat the same song, surely.

There was a knock at the door, and he called, “Come in.”

Daisy was the makeup girl. A nice touch, Benson thought, and tried to recall whom he should be grateful to.

“It would help if you lay down,” she said, and he did.

She opened the large black box she carried and got out a monstrous powder puff. “I’m just going to put a little powder on you, and—” Her other hand dabbed at his cheeks. “A little rouge. Just a touch.”

“I’m sunburned, I suppose,” he ventured.

“A little white, really.”

“Daisy?”

“What is it? Don’t purse your lips. You need a lot of color there, too.”

“Daisy, don’t you know me?”

“Now the powder.” It came as a sudden, suffocating cloud; and before it cleared, he heard the door slam.

He got up, went to the door, and looked out. Jennifer had told him to stay in the dressing room, but looking out would do no harm, surely.

Daisy was vanishing around a turn in the corridor, and a very pale but very attractive young woman in a black pantsuit was striding toward him. “Tim? There you are.”

An old sea song, “The Bulgine Run,” popped into his head, and he played the first few chords for her. “How’s this? I’m thinking of doing it on the eleven-o’clock news.”

She laughed. She had an infectious laugh, and he found that he enjoyed it—that he was drawn to her, in fact.

“Come on,” she said, smiling. “Time’s up.” And then, as they walked down the corridor together, “Would you like to play that thing for me some more? I, like, dig rock stars.”

“I was expecting Jennifer,” he told her, and was on the point of telling her that she was preferable.

“She’s busy right now. What was that song?”

“This?” Benson played the opening bars, and she nodded.

“It’s about sailors unloading freight in a railroad yard. You have to know nineteenth-century slang, sailors’ slang and railroad slang, to understand everything. They yell to each other and to a girl in what we’d call a taxi, and so on.”

The pale young woman in the black pantsuit grinned at him, her teeth flashing in the dimness of the corridor. “I’ve known lots of sailors and railroad men. I knew Casey Jones.”

Benson grinned back. “I’ll bet you did.”

“Sure, lots,” she said. They turned into a new corridor. It was even darker than the last, but there was a light at the end. “Won’t you sing it for me? I’d love to hear you.”

“All right.” He would have one more song ready, and that could only be good.

“Oh the smartest clipper that you can find …”

To his surprise, the pale young woman in black joined him on the refrain: “A-hee, a-ho, ain’t you ’most done?”