Phantom Banjo by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Read Free Book Online Page A

we do
either," George snapped, poking his head back in the door. "Come
on, Jules. I thought I saw a help wanted sign at McDonald's on the
way in."
    Josh sighed as he watched them go. He did not
look forward to playing with a rockabilly band and he was sorry the
kids had to be let down. But he certainly wasn't going to blame
himself for their lack of foresight. At least Juli hadn't refused
the money.
     
    * * *
     
    "There," the woman said, "how's them
apples?"
    "Huh?" the boy asked.
    "How'd you like that story? Lots of high
finance and businesspeople—"
    "Yeah, but the ending wasn't happy," the girl
complained. "When do the Martins invest the seed money Josh gave
them, make a killing on junk bonds, join the Equity, get lots of
jobs in big places, and live happily ever after?"
    "They don't."
    "But that man, Josh, told her . . ."
    "He was wrong, I'm afraid. They did try to
join the Equity later, with the money he'd given Julianne, but the
Equity was more interested in interrogating them about gigs they'd
played illegally, and fining them for it, than they were about
making them members and getting them jobs."
    The little girl who knew
about geography sniffed. "Too bad the Martins didn't know about the
laws Equity was passing in time to use our
government's mechanisms for protesting laws they didn't
like."
    "Oh, they and a few other folks did. They
signed petitions, wrote a few letters. But mostly when it all
started they were on the road, pooped from trying to keep up, make
a living. The devils had their people in key positions in the
Equity, the courts, and Congress. Those minions knew exactly the
right way to get to the musicians with boring language and stupid
wrangling. If say, the devils had hired people with guns or gotten
the police to lock them all up for disturbing the peace or
something, why, it would have been just like the head devil said.
The singers would have written a passel of new songs about the
great struggle' and would have defended themselves eloquently.
Every good singer is at least half actor and thrives on drama. What
they can't take is being ground down, bored into oblivion by
bureaucracy. So for starters, the devils had their minions
introduce sneaky little bills that had to be nagged down over and
over by boring petitions and writing letters to the same tired
congressmen about the same old bills with thus-and-such new
attachments each time. That's just the kind of fighting singers are
real bad at."
    The boy shrugged. "It sounds like a mere
labor and management dispute to me. Josh got to be management—"
    "Only he wasn't," the sister said. "He
belonged to the Equity and wanted them to. He directly opposed
management interests in general by insisting the Martins do
something that would cause extra work, time, and money for the
employer, when he could have used the company's band instead."
    The woman thought these were the damndest
children she had ever run across, or she would have thought so had
she not met other kids like them lately. The way they argued
business deals and who was squashing whom was maybe no worse than
in her day, when kids shot each other with toy bazookas when they
played soldier or toy pistols when they played cowboy, but the
enthusiasm of these children was far more ruthless, in a cold,
anemic kind of way.
    "You 're both wrong," she said. "Josh and the
Martins were both labor, only they forgot that. The devils and the
bureaucrats had successfully managed to make them think they had
different businesses. The Equity laws defeated people like the
Martins and the immigration laws, under the guise of controlling
drug traffic, kept out people like the Scottish singer the Chaveses
were bringing in, until there were just a few big-name people left
singing anything at all. Which made everybody separate and a little
mad at each other. Which made each and every one of them all that
much easier to pick off when the devils were ready to pounce. The
immigration laws not only kept people like