Picking the Ballad's Bones by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

back and get it.
    So she could tell right
off he wasn't going to be much help the way he was. Probably be
more trouble when he got to feeling better too. Willie MacKai was a
good man but for all his easy drawl he was a jumpy sort of man and
not a bit easy to keep track of, according to former girlfriends
who had cried in their beer over him to Gussie in years past. Once
he was fully awake again, she figured herding cockroaches at a
garbage dump would be a cinch compared to trying to hang on to
Willie. So possibly she should be grateful that he was still
stupefied and take the bull by the horns and do something herself.
    What she wanted to do was find the
others and make a plan, but since she had no idea how to do that,
the best thing to do would be to make a plan on her own and try to
get Willie MacKai to help her. He stood in the light drizzly rain,
looking around him blankly. Down at the end of the train, two cars
were being unloaded into trucks.
    Gussie sighed and tucked the banjo
head into her basket bag so it wouldn't get wet. Lord only knew
what had become of the garment bag Willie had wrapped it in when he
came through customs. The banjo thrummed as she shifted it, its
strings muted by the roar of disgruntled animals from the cages
being unloaded down the track
    This must be some rich
circus to have railroad cars and trucks to haul their equipment. The banjo twanged
a little tune now and it sank into Gussie's consciousness. She
could hear who?—Doc Watson?—singing that song "The Gypsy Davey."
That song was one widely sung in the United States but it
originally came from the British Isles—hard to tell which place,
which figured, since Gypsies by definition tended to get
around.
    The sign on the side of the trucks
said Circus Rom, plain as the nose on your face. Rom meant Gypsy in
their own language, Gussie knew from her reading. As in Romany. And
the people dodging around in the half-light were mostly dark as
Indians, black-haired and very tan. But weren't the Gypsies
hereabouts supposed to look like other folks? She could clearly
remember from old Ewan MacColl songs and one sung by the Clancy
Brothers lines about tinkers, as they called the Gypsies here.
Tinkers, according to the liner notes, weren't dark, mostly, but
red-haired and blond and as purely mixed up as other folks. Most of
the ethnic-looking Gypsies, or an awful lot of them, had been
killed off by the Nazis in concentration camps along with the
Jewish people and everybody else Hitler wanted to get rid of. And
mostly, she'd always thought, the Gypsies didn't run big operations
like this one. But what the hell did she know about it? Her only
contact with Gypsies at home had been seeing the palm-reading signs
out in front of otherwise abandoned buildings in South Tacoma. She
never had run into any of them at all while living in West Texas.
Well, not that she knew of. If she had seen them, she probably took
them for Mexicans.
    All of that would have
absolutely fascinated her a few months ago, back before this
trouble first started, before the fire at Anna Mae's folk festival
and the long drive Gussie had made with Willie, Julianne, and that
cute little Texas Ranger smack into a death trap. Before everyone
she knew or cared about seemed to be getting killed or hurt or in
danger of it. Before Lettie and Mic had gotten themselves thrown
into jail for trying to bring Hy MacDonald
back across the Canadian border. Folk-singers seemed to be
contraband these days.
    But—well, damn. She was tired. She could call Mac-Donald,
couldn't she? He'd been deported back here to Scotland and she
remembered that he lived near Edinburgh someplace. If she hadn't
been so strung out she'd have thought of it a long time
ago.
    "Come on, Willie," she said, taking
him by the arm and firmly leading him toward the
station.
    "What's wrong with this picture?" he
asked suddenly, holding up his hands to make a frame, putting the
whole sentence in quotes.
    "What do you mean?" she