The Gutbucket Quest

by Piers Anthony

  “I probably shouldn’t be, but I am. Sure does smell good. Where’s Progress?”

  “He’s outside, messing around with the garden and feeding the birds. Get your clothes on. Breakfast will be ready pretty quick, now.” She moved back to the stove and dumped a big pan of biscuits onto a plate. She shook flour into the ham grease to make gravy, and her hands were white with it as she poured in the milk and began to stir with a fork.

  Slim watched her ass jiggle in the shorts as she stirred the gravy. He was embarrassed. He slept naked, so it was a trick to get his pants on without Nadine seeing him. He managed, looking over his shoulder frequently to see if she was watching him. He got up to go to the bathroom, and when he came back, Progress was inside and three plates of ham, biscuits and gravy were sitting on the big table.

  “You want some coffee?” Nadine asked him as he sat down.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  She brought him a cup and they all sat down and started eating. The ham was sweet and hot, the biscuits and redeye gravy as good as he’d ever had. Slim ate with real relish. It was far better than his own cooking, though he considered himself an excellent cook. There was no talk until the food was gone and the coffee drunk. Only the crunch of chewed food and the slurp of coffee and the scrape of biscuits soaking up the last dregs of gravy off the plates. When they were finished, Progress leaned back in his chair and patted his belly.

  “Well, chillen,” he said. “We got a busy day, today. I think, firstest, we should go and get Slim some clothes.”

  “But Progress—” Slim started to say.

  Progress waved his hand lazily. “No, son,” he said. “All you got’s what you got on. Man needs more than that to get by. Now, you go on in and take yourself a good shower. When you’re ready we’ll go on into town, get some pants and shirts and socks and such. Then we’ll go to see T-Bone, see what can we do.”

  “What do you expect, Daddy?” Nadine asked.

  “Truth?”

  Slim and Nadine nodded.

  “I ain’t expectin’ no thin’ from him. I just want him to know that I know.”

  “You think he’ll do anything to us?” Slim asked. He was scared, but not badly. He’d always been able to take care of himself, martial-arts training had insured that, though he’d never been in an actual fight.

  “Not while we’re on his property,” Progress replied cynically. “Once we leave, though, and while we’re on the road gettin’ to the people we need, I s’pect he might put a few folks on us.”

  “How?” Slim asked.

  “Don’t think he’d try to kill us, though I ain’t at all sure of it. That’s too easy for him, and it ain’t what he wants. He might beat on us, or try to. But you a big healthy boy, and Nadine, she can take care of herself if she got to. I thinks we can stand on our own there. What I’m worried about is how he’ll try to use the power against us.”

  Nadine got up to clear the dishes, as if she didn’t want to hear or be part of the discussion.

  “I thought,” Slim said, “that he didn’t have any power.”

  “Yes,” Nadine said from the kitchen. “Just like Daddy doesn’t go to the sno-cone stand three times a week to get his horrible frozen pickles on a stick.”

  “Nadine, now. I likes those. I don’t tell you what kind of junk food to eat, do I?” He turned to Slim, a serious look on his face. “He’s got power. It ain’t blues power, but it’s power just the same. He’s got the Gutbucket, and he’s got all his machines. I don’t know how, but he draws power from them machines. And we’re at a disadvantage. The magic of the blues is more powerful, more natural, but it’s a slow power, like wind and water. His power is quick, like fire. We got to build up, he destroys. Always easier to tear somethin’ down than it is to put it up. We gonna have to draw on the deep power, the lightning and the rain, the trees and the land. That ain’t nothin’ easy. It’s why we got to have the right people at the river.”

  Slim nodded. “I’m gonna take that shower,” he said, getting up from the table and going into the bathroom. All the talk of magic and power disturbed him. He’d wished for a chance to play, to be on the inside of something. There’d been a saying in the fantasy novels he’d read, something about not wishing because you might get what you wished for. Well, now it looked as if he’d gotten it. This—it was too far inside to be comfortable. He’d lost his home, his world, everything he owned except his guitar and the clothes on his back. He wondered too, if his kitties were still okay without him.

  But there was Nadine, and there was Progress, both as a friend and a teacher, teaching him the true blues. And it looked like, scary as it might be, there was going to be some fun and adventure, as well. Maybe it was a fair trade, after all, he thought, stepping into the shower.

  Yet there was something weird and awful too, as if he’d just caught a whiff of a ripening corpse. Something close but faint. He couldn’t pin it down, but he felt it right here in the bathroom. Probably his imagination, but—

  He was going to ask the others if they smelled anything here, but since he couldn’t actually smell anything himself, he let it go. They had enough to do without concerning themselves about spooks he tried to dream up. But whatever it was had sent an ugly chill of horror through him.

  Later, driving into town, with Slim sitting by the window this time, he said, “Progress, talk to me about the blues.” Maybe that would take his mind off the phantom in the bathroom.

  Nadine snorted and elbowed him in the ribs. Progress just asked, “What you want to know, son?”

  “Everything. I dunno. What’s it like to be a star?”

  “Star? Son, I’m just another Tejas guitar player. Oh, I got somethin’ different to say with my music, I guess. But I have to keep it in its place. It’s a gift. It’s all a gift, and I have to keep givin’ it back all the time or it goes away. If I start believin’ it’s all my doin’, it’ll be my un-doin’. So I commit myself to doin’ the most I can with the gifts I have, so’s they can do as much good for as many people as they can.

  “Comes right down to the bone,” he said, sighing, “I likes to fish. I veg out. Sit there with the line in the water, thinkin’ of riffs. It’s the most relaxin’ thing. I go into my own world and think of lots of riffs. Yessir, pretty soon now, when we get the Gutbucket back and I see you and Nadine gettin’ along, I’m gonna pack it up and head down on the Brazos. Do me some real fishin’.

  “I’ll just get in my old pickup, throw some clothes in the back, drive cross country. Get me two good poles and lay down on the fishin’ bank. Might could drive my bus, could I ever get the time to fix it. Put a cookstove in it, cook right on the river, catch ‘em and cook ‘em. That be the life. Course, I’ll keep a guitar or two around, practice a bit, write some songs, maybe play a gig now and then.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” Nadine said. “You know you’ll never retire. You can’t give it up.”

  “That’s what you say, girl. Might be I have me some different ideas.”

  “How’d you come up?” Slim asked.

  “Whoo, son! You wantin’ to know ancient history. Lessee. I growed up with the blues. Never knew nobody that didn’t when I was a kid. It was just the natural thing, porch players sittin’ around doin’ it all the time. Back then, us kids made guitars out of cigar boxes and saplings. We’d use strands from wire whisk brooms for strings. We couldn’t play much of nothin’, but we’d get a sound, you know. Later on, my mama and daddy got me an ole guitar from the pawn and I started learnin’ to play it.”

  “You just had to ask, didn’t you,” Nadine said, poking Slim once again.

  “Hush up,” Progress said. “The boy ain’t heard it before, even if you has. Anyway, son, when I was, oh, ‘bout twelve, I guess it was, McPhail’s Medicine Show come through town, sellin’ medicine for rheumatism, arthritis and everything that ailed you. He liked to have him a little show, and he liked to have a home boy for that, so I played and sang a little song and he paid me five cents and all the medicin
e I could use. I swear, my mama had bottles of that medicine till her dyin’ day. Made me take it when I was poorly, too, which made me get right back up on my feets.

  “Later on, me and my buddies put a little band together. Wasn’t but three of us, and when we started out we didn’t know but three songs. But we played ‘em fast, medium and slow and we got over, somehow. After a few years of that, I met Rosie, like I told you, and everything else just growed out of that. He taught me how to play, to really play, without sayin’ anything or tellin’ me what to do. He’d just look at you and play a little thing, and you’d know how he was feelin’.”

  “Do you sound like him?” Slim asked.

  Progress laughed. His laugh and those shining gold teeth still made Slim feel good. Maybe because it never sounded as if Progress was laughing at him.

  “Nope,” Progress answered. “Or only a little. It’s both, or leastwise it’s mostly not. Them were crazy days. We used to have us a Nash Rambler to drive to the gigs. Zero to sixty in twenty-eight seconds. Fake whitewalls that would fly off like flat donuts anytime you got over forty. But while we’d drive, Rosie’d talk about women and the blues. And he spent a lot of time tryin’ to show me how to find my own groove and not be jumpin’ into his.

  “You do take somethin’,” he continued. “You get an idea or a groove from somebody. You don’t necessarily got to hear them play, right there. You knows what they play like and just bein’ with that person give you a little thing, so that when you pick up your own guitar again, you might could come up with somethin’ different. That’s ‘cause you got a different feelin’ in your body about bein’ with someone. You catch a vibe from someone and you goes back to the shed to find out what it is.

  “Oh, I knows there’s some people who try to take on another player’s groove, steal his riffs and all. But the music ain’t real that way and you can’t take someone else’s power. The music got to be an expression of your state of bein’, not just somethin’ you done took on.”

  “Well,” Slim said. “I feel like I got my own thing going. I always thought that was important. See,” he continued, blushing a little, “I was kind of famous once, myself—a long, long time ago. I didn’t know what I was doing. Still don’t, I guess. But at least I have an idea of when to stand forward and when not to.”

  “You’ve got some attitude,” Nadine said.

  “Nah. I gave up attitude a long time ago. See, what I’d do was practice in my bathroom with the door closed. I’d turn it up and when my balls would vibrate I’d know I had it right. The hair on my arms would stand up and I’d hear that air movin’ and I’d just scream. But when I played, and I played good, I’d feel like somebody, I’d feel all together.”

  “That’s the power,” Progress said.

  “Yeah, I suppose. It’s nothin’ like it is here, though. I was doing good just getting up on stage and making sure whatever I was wearing was funnier than my body, and going out after the gig for fifty-two ribs and left-handed cigarettes. But, see, I always felt I was missing something. That’s why I moved here—er, where I was before I came here. Trying to find it.”

  “How did you start out?” Nadine asked him. She seemed more than routinely curious, but Slim wasn’t sure that her interest was really in him. It was almost as if she was trying to ascertain something else, something to which he was only peripheral.

  “Huh? I started out with nothing. Still got most of it left, too. No, okay, okay. I grew up in this dinky little farm town called Ducor. It was real close to another little no-horse town called Pixley. There was this minister’s son, named Roy Buchanan, used to come around my house. His dad didn’t like the school in Pixley or something, so he went to the school in Ducor. I was younger than he was, so I don’t know why he let me hang around, except my dad had horses. He’d been playing guitar for a while, and he started teaching me. The blues.

  “He moved away a few years later, to Canada. He started playing with a top band, making his name, but he’d gotten me started and it was something I loved. I kept on playing, started a band in high school and we made it big, real big. But what with the women and the drugs and the money, I got all fucked up, so I put down the music entirely for along time.”

  “Why are you back playing, now?” Nadine asked. Still it seemed that she was after something else, as if Slim were carrying some hint of a larger mystery, some more important thing behind him she was trying to see.

  “A few years ago, I just got hungry for it, so I picked up my guitar and started playing. Side gigs, sessions, jamming. I thought about getting in touch with Roy again, and I’d just gotten ahold of his address when I heard that he’d died. After I heard that, I knew I had to play again. It was like I’d be disloyal to him or something, if I didn’t. And here I am. But there’s still something missing from me. That’s why I keep asking you stuff, trying to get hold of the idea.”

  “That’s fine,” Progress said. “You ask all you want. Far as I ever knowed, that’s the only way a body ever finds anything out.”

  “Yeah,” Nadine said gruffly. “But shut up now. We’re at the store. Let’s go get your clothes and see if we can’t get you looking a little more respectable.”

  Later, with Slim dressed in new jeans and the kind of floral shirt he liked, and with the empty tool box of the pickup filled with packages, they drove to the pan of town where friendly, one-story buildings changed to tall, imposing edifices. An almost invisible haze of steel-blue smoke colored the sky. Even the sun seemed hotter in this part of town. They paid a lot attendant two dollars for a space, and got out of the truck to walk.

  “Can you beat that?” Progress said. “Chargin’ a man money just to park his truck. That’s T-Bone’s doin’, tryin’ to make more money. That man’d charge for air if he could.”

  As they walked the sidewalks, Slim noticed that things here were opposite to the world he’d come from. In his world, the downtown areas were always clean, nearly polished. But here in Tejas, at least Armadillo, downtown was the only part of the city he’d seen that wasn’t clean. On the contrary, it was gray, dingy and depressing. The glass in the tall buildings didn’t shine in the sunlight and anonymous trash blew through the streets and gutters.

  The sidewalks were empty. They headed for the tallest building of all: a black, seemingly windowless tower of stone. The only indication that it was more than a column of solid rock was the glass front doors and a bright red sign at the very top that read T.B.P. UNLIMITED.

  They walked up the short flight of stairs and went through the streaked glass doors into a bare lobby, devoid of life. They went quickly to the elevator, which opened to them almost immediately. It was empty, and smelled faintly of urine or cigar smoke. Slim couldn’t identify the odor except as stale and bitter and unpleasant. Nadine wrinkled her nose and glanced significantly at her father, as if the smell was proving a point. But Slim couldn’t figure what that point could be, except that something disgusting must have been there recently. Something like—whatever might have been in the bathroom, in the morning. But that didn’t make any sense.

  They were going to the very top floor, and it was an excruciatingly slow and bumpy elevator, almost as if it had been designed to keep the riders in suspense as to the safety of the metal box and the cable that held it. No one interrupted the ride, and Slim wondered if there were actually any other people in the building.

  The three of them stepped from the elevator and were faced by a uniform gray entry office. Against one wall sat a gigantic desk and at the desk sat a gigantic woman who could easily fulfill every pre-teenage boy’s nightmare of the ultimate authority figure: a combination of the wicked witch of Oz and Grendel, with traces of bigfoot and the Marquis de Sade thrown into improve her looks. A formidable woman who glared at them with obvious hatred for disturbing her important task of doing nothing.

  “Can I help you?” she sneered.

  Progress, unintimidated, walked right up to her desk and looked her in the eyes. “We want to see T-Bone
,” he said sternly.

  “Do you people have an appointment?” the woman asked. The expression on her face showed clearly that the entirety of her job was to ensure that no one, ever, got inside.

  “Nope. But T-Bone will see me. You just tell him that Progress is here to talk to him.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, her tone derisive. “Just a moment.” She lifted the receiver of a red phone and pushed a button. After a few seconds, she mumbled into it, making sure that no one but the person on the other end could understand anything she said. Then her eyes widened and she hung the phone up quickly. As if Slim, Progress and Nadine had ceased to exist, she waved her arm in the general direction of a wide door behind her and said, “Go in, go in.” Then she began shuffling and studying the papers that lay on her desk.

  They walked through the door she’d indicated, into an office that, to Slim’s surprise, was totally, brilliantly white. Behind a high desk sat the man they’d come to see. He was thin and fishbelly white, as if his life was lived completely within his office. He had little pig eyes, a thin, scraggly mustache, and stubby fingers. He was dressed in a white suit with a red tie, and seemed intensely preoccupied with counting the several bundles of filth-covered money that lay on the desk before him. He was using a dirty handkerchief to clean the bills as he counted them, and he ran them lovingly through his hands and before his eyes as if drawing power from their existence.

  He looked up as they entered the office. “Progress,” he said, smiling crookedly, twitchingly. “Come in. Come in.” He nodded and added, “Nadine. You look mighty good.”

  Nadine pointedly averted her gaze.

  His porcine eyes scanned Slim carefully and his smile broadened into a leer. Slim felt violated, the way a child would by the touch of a molester.

  Pickens turned back to Progress. “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “My new apprentice,” Progress replied. “Slim.”

  Pickens seemed to flinch for just a moment; then the nasty smile returned to his face. When he spoke, a venom had entered his already unpleasant voice. “What? Did you find yet another poor fool to humiliate?”