Willie looked over at him quietly. “Sure, Sam. I’ll play something.”
Willie Whitehorse played.
As a boy my Father told me
When the mountains and the rivers were being
taken down
Down taken, taken down down down Down down taken way down Tom down…
He sang and he played and he played and he sang. And Milo Uccelo and Vince Rivera and Drivin* Jack Cavanack, they just listened. Sat and they listened. Any cop who’d gotten a look at their frozen faces would have busted ’em right then, on suspicion. No question, they were high. High and wild, shootin’ up on the music of Willie Whitehorse.
Rivera was the first to join in, moving like a dream man, coaxing a sweet quail-wail from his chrome harmonica, finding the blank spots few in Willie’s song and filling them in with notes like crystallized honey.
Then a low giant step from the back of the studio, getting louder and louder, moving faster and quicker, the hunger cry of a dragonfly. Drivin’ Jack Cavanack, his eyes glazed and distant, put his wheels under
188
Wolfstroker
Willie’s guitar and Rivera’s harmonica and took off down the yellow brick road at a hundred twenty per.
Uccelo fought it, swam in it, gave in to it. His hands seemed to move of their own volition, the deep heavy bell-clear sound coming right out of his fingers, to scatter like black orchid blooms about the room.
Sam felt it too, but he had nothing to bring in. Nothing except the faces at the control-room window, noses and hands of employees and passersby squinched up tight against the coo! glass. Bodies beneath moving, heaving, twisting to the irresistible, pounding, relentless power of the music.