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.

  Oh Shenando’ I long to hear you,

  Away, you rolling river…

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

  “Oh Shenando’ I long to hear you,

  Away, you rolling river.

  Oh Shenando’ I long to hear you.

  Away, I’m bound away,

  Across the wide Missouri…”

  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.

  “Oh Shenando’ I love your daughter,

  Roll away, you rolling river.

  Oh Shenando’ I’m bound to leave her,

  Away, I’m bound away,

  Across the wide Missouri!”

  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.

  “In all this jam, there’s none like Ma’am,

  For playin’ nor for singin’.

  She’d drove the land, her an’ her band,

  And set the big rooms ringin’…

  “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.

  “Choppergal, choppergal, dressed so fine,

  Got a gal already, an’ that gal’s mine…”

  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!

  “Yet even then, when peace was singing

  Her halcyon song o’er land and sea,

  Though joy and hope to others bringing,

  She only brought new tears to thee.”

  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.

  “Then who can ask for notes of pleasure,

  My drooping harp, from chords like thine?

  Alas, the lark’s gay morning measure,

  As ill would suit the swan’s decline.

  Or how shall I, who love, who bless thee,

  Invoke thy breath for freedom’s strains,

  When e’en the wreaths in which I dress thee,

  Are sadly mixed, half flowers, half chains?”

  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?

  “In all this jam—”

  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.

  “There’s none like Ma’am,

  For playing or for singing.

  She’d drive this land, she and her band,

  And set the big rooms ringing.”

  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?

  “Her face you’d see on your TV,

  ’Most any day you played it.”

  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.

  “She’d like to gone, with me, her son,

  But this here jam’s delayed it.

  Now here we stay, and pray each day…”

  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.”