Comeback Tour

again, y'know. Them fellers up there in Washington want to mess with our way of life.'

Nick's assistant Gandy was working on a Studebaker across the workshop. He kept shooting Chamberlain dark looks. Elvis wondered if the mechanic had any kinfolk out in the boondocks who'd fallen prey to one of the CAF's indenture sweeps. He knew the black man was a worshipper at the hounfort down on Highway 51, and that the voodoo church had been turned over by hoodheads a couple of times. Gandy was hefting a heavy wrench, and looking at Chamberlain's long white hair, wondering about the eggshell skull under it.

'Maybe your way of life ain't so good, Chamberlain.'

The GOB Op was really steaming now. His neck was bulging, straining his collar button and bootlace tie.

'Freak you. Colonel. Get with the programme, or get out of the business.'

'If your programme means whipping and flogging and all that Southern-fried horsecrap, then you can take it all and shove it…'

'Why, you redneck white trash peckerwood. You're just a nigra wrapped up in a white skin.'

'I've heard that said before.'

The GOB had been getting fat off indenture for a few years, first hauling in the indentees, and then picking up fees from the corps for bringing back any absconding happy workers. None of the national Agencies—Turner- Harvest-Ramirez, Hammond Maninski, and the others—would touch the indenture system with a ten-foot electric cattle prod, and so the Good Ole Boys had a monopoly on slave-taking. Unofficially, GenTech had a fifty dollar bounty on the head of any able-bodied indentee brought back in a condition to work. And sometimes they weren't too scrupulous about examining the bytework, so, if the indentee you were after got clean over the state line or wound up crippled or dead, you could just pick someone with similar skin-colouring and slap the tagmarker on them. By the time anyone noticed the missing person, he'd have his own indentee status stuck on him and the New South had itself another gaily singing darkie in the sweatshops.

'Listen, guitar man. You've been scratching up some mighty important folks. This may just have been the last nice li'l talk you get. Mr Judgement Q. Harbottle himself asked me to be real persuasive. Y'know, him and Burtram Fassett went back a long way…'

'Yeah, I heard they were real close in kindergarten, loved dressing up for Hallowe'en in them white sheets and lynching all the other kids' kittens and puppy dogs while they burned those cute little wooden crosses on the porch…'

A couple of Gandy's buddies from the hounfort had shown up. There was often a knot of them hanging around Nick's workshop, doing odd jobs, swapping boasts about broads and cars, listening to Sovrock on the FM, shooting craps. Gandy was pointing at Chamberlain, and making ugly faces as he filled them in on the little man in the white linen suit. The Good Ole Boy hadn't noticed them yet.

'Go right on ahead and laugh. Colonel Presley, laugh all you like, and curl that thick nigra lip o' yours until it just plain sticks to your nose, why don't you. The South is changin', and you'd better change with it, or maybe you're like to find yourself out in some cotton field somewhere with all your nigra buddies singin' them ol' worksongs you used to wiggle your butt to…'

Gandy's half-brother Big Bill was walking over. Big Bill was not a small guy. Elvis had seen him single-handedly win a tug o'war with five members of the Union Avenue Bloods gangcult, and one of his party tricks when he had a few brews in him was to bite bullets in half with his eyeteeth.

'…or maybe you won't be in them cotton fields, guitar man, maybe you'll wind up under 'em. You think about that for a while, hey? And furthermore, I just reckon I might take it into my mind to drop in on that diner you're always hangin' around and give that fat old hash-slinger Cissy Smedley some o' that deep-dish lovin' she ain't been gettin' from you, you dried-up ol'…'

'Is this dude bothering you, Colonel?' Big Bill asked, his flipper-sized hand landing hard on Chamberlain's shoulder.

Elvis shrugged.

The Good Ole Boy looked up at Big Bill, and cowered. Big Bill smiled, showing off eighty-eight ivories. A diamond sparkled in one of his front teeth. Gandy and the boys had wandered over.

'Yo, Elvis,' said the mechanic, stretching out his hand. The Op slapped it down, and raised his own palm to be punched.

'Yo, Gandy.'

'How's ever' li'l thang?'

'Mighty fine.'

Chamberlain was trembling now, and the angry flush was bleaching into a chickenbelly white.

Dollman Cleele, part-time priest of Santeria, pulled out a lump of hard wax, and started whittling away at it with a tiny switchblade. Big Bill angled Chamberlain's head from side to side so the Dollman could get a good likeness.

'Heard you saw some action down in the Delta a few days back,' said Gandy.

'Some.'

'My man, Elvis. Word is you done pretty good for the bros in the wetside.'

Big Bill stuck his long tongue in Chamberlain's ear, and whispered something that turned the Good Ole Boy a yellowish shade of grey. Here was an Op who could get a whole rainbow on his face. The Dollman's fingers moved fast, and flakes of wax fell to the floor like dandruff.

'I tried to do my best, Gandy. I was paid. It's my job.'

'You tellin' me you couldn't bring down ten-twenty times the kish workin' for the Man here than you can helpin' out the pore folks?'

The Dollman held up the tiny white head, and his friends admired it. He pulled a headless wooden human figure, its joints loose, out of his pocket, and stuck the head onto the spike sticking up from its neck. He showed the doll to Chamberlain.

'I just go my own way,' Elvis said. 'I don't like people owning any part of me.'

Gandy produced a switchknife, and pressed a pearl stud. A six-inch blade, razor-edged, sprang out.

'I get the 'pression the Man here don't reckon much to the bros?'

Gandy touched the tip of Chamberlain's nose with his knifepoint

'You could say that.'

'Hey, massah,' Gandy said in a high-pitched voice, 'kin Ah pluck yo cotton?'

Chamberlain's chin was shaking. His cigar slipped out of his mouth.

'I always wondered,' began Big Bill, 'why does a honky need two ears?'

The bros looked at each other, shrugging and saying, 'Swiped if I know.' Gandy nicked the lobe of Chamberlain's left ear.

'Hey, massah, yo bleedin'. Yo' bleedin' 'zactly the same colour as us tan-tinted types. Ain't that an amazin' fact. Under that lilywhite skin, you just a mess of red blood and brown shit and all them other colours.'

Gandy's knife leaped forwards, and Chamberlain flinched, green slime leaking from his nose as he blubbered. Gandy's hand moved fast, and his knife was back in his overall pocket. Chamberlain wasn't hurt. He opened his eyes, and looked around.

Gandy held up a tuft of white hair, which he passed over to the Dollman. Elvis had seen this done before. The Dollman took the hairs and fixed them to the wax head, warming up the surface with a thumb-rub to make the material soft, and then pressing the hair in.

'Finished,' he said.

Big Bill let Chamberlain go. The Good Ole Boy was sagging.

The Dollman gave Elvis the stick-figure. 'Here's a present, Elvis.'

'Thank you.'

'The spirits be with you, my son.'

The Dollman was twenty-three, and he called everyone 'my son,' even his grandfather. Elvis had heard he was the best conjure man in the city.

Elvis looked at the little Chamberlain, and at the original model.

The Good Ole Boy was straightening his tie and wiping his face off. Some of the starch was coming back.

'I hope you don't think all that hoodoo mumbo-jumbo scares me none?'

Elvis tossed the doll from hand to hand, almost letting it fall. Chamberlain cringed every time it flew into the air. Everybody had heard the story about the Japcorp exec who gave Dollman's sister Daisy Cleele a squeeze too many