The Gutbucket Quest

by Piers Anthony

  “Maybe,” Nadine said. She pointed to a crowd of men gathered around the sound board. “There’s Daddy,” she said.

  Progress turned as they approached. The side of his face was still bruised, but the gold-toothed smile was back, and shining more broadly than ever. “Howdy, chillen,” he said. He turned back to the men at the board, muttered a few instructions and turned back to Slim and Nadine.

  “You okay, Daddy?” Nadine asked.

  “Sure I is,” Progress replied. “A little worse for wear, but nothin’ permanent. I been worse and hurt more. How about you kids?”

  “Shaky,” Slim answered. “But so far, so good.”

  “I talked to Eli,” Progress said. “I know what he told you. You okay with that? You livin’ with it?”

  “Okay?” Slim shrugged. “Nah. Not really. I don’t see that there’s much choice, though, so I guess I just get through it the best I can.”

  “Good for you,” Progress said, slapping Slim on the back hard enough to nearly knock him over. “How about you, Nadine?”

  “I’m fine, Daddy. Just a little worried about Slim.”

  “Yep, I can see that. Anyhow, why don’t we go have us a little bite and get set up. You’re gonna need some playin’ time, Slim. I knows that amp you done got. It’s fine, fine equipment, but you’re gonna have to cozen it a bit. The man who built it, Dusty Hills was his name, he sorta enchantivated it. He was lookin’ for a way to amplify the power, you see. But the thing has its likes and dislikes, so it can back up on you if you don’t treat it right and take it in hand.” Progress chuckled, shaking his head. “Ole Dusty,” he said, “he was a good boy, but a mite crazed.”

  “Oh, good. Just what I need. An amp with a mind of its own. Like I don’t have enough to deal with.”

  “Now, son,” Progress said, patting Slim’s shoulder in a fatherly fashion that Slim basked in. “Don’t awfulize it. I knows you think you got a hard road, but you’re ridin’ the clutch. You gots to let yourself up a little. You’ll have the best of the backroom boys behind you, and me and Nadine’ll be right up there with you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Slim said. “Nadine and I, we’ve talked a lot, so I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Just a little scared.”

  “Well, son, to tell the absolute truth, I guess we all are, a little. But sometimes you just gotta kick it in the get along. You gots to know what you’re doin’. You got the power, plenty of that. You got the amp and you gonna have the Gutbucket.”

  “Oh,” Slim said, almost bitterly. “Let’s not forget Shango.”

  “Yep, that, too. Ole T-Bone, he ain’t never gonna be able to beat All that.”

  “Daddy,” Nadine said. “Isn’t it enough just to get the Gutbucket back? Do we have to go after the rest of it?”

  “You talks like it was easy, girl. Slim’s gonna have to steal the Gutbucket back, and that ain’t no cinch. But if he does it, we gots to go all the way down with it. If we don’t, T-Bone’ll never give up whippin’ on us, or tryin’ to. He’s a damn tush hog, bullyin’ everybody. I don’t much likes it but we’re gonna have to kill him too dead to skin.”

  Slim laughed. “Okay,” he said. “But listen here, talk’s cheap but it takes money to buy whiskey. How in hell am I suppose to steal the Gutbucket?”

  “Not sure, son,” Progress said. “But T-Bone, he might be bad and he might have power, but he’s kinda stupid, too. No imagination. He’s the kinda man would ride a horse every week, but he’d be pissed off ’cause he had to go the same direction as the horse. That’s what I’m countin’ on. His stupidity.”

  They’d walked and talked their way to the big circus tent. It was filled with chairs and tables and people eating and a smell of food that was almost overpowering. The three of them sat at a table and, after a man in Torriero white had taken their orders, Progress continued his talk.

  “The way I figure it,” he said, “is that T-Bone’s gonna have a few of his boys outta sight, holdin’ the Gutbucket. But we’ve got a whole slew of folks gonna be up on that there stage buildin’ up the power for the blowout. T-Bone ain’t gonna sit by for that. He’s gonna be around. I got some boys I hope are gonna distract him. While he’s boggin’ off, that’s when you makes your move, you and Nadine.”

  “What move do we make?” Slim asked.

  “That ain’t up to me, son. That’s gonna have to be up to you and Nadine. You’re the ones takin’ the risks, you’re the ones got to be in control of it. You and Nadine make a mighty fine team. Use that and go from there. Trust your feelings. You been doin’ fine so far, but the hard part’s comin’ up, and I ain’t even talkin’ about stealin’ the Gutbucket.”

  “That’s not the hard part?” Slim asked incredulously.

  “Nope,” Progress replied. “Not for you. Remember, even after gettin’ it, you still gots to play it. You gots to call down the power and bust a move wide open.”

  “That’s right,” Nadine said. “All the things we’ve been talking about. The surrender.”

  “That’s it, son. Remember, when I first told you ’bout the power. I told you you was gonna have to surrender to it, that you was gonna have a hard time with that. You’ve changed a lot since you first fell in here, but that hasn’t changed out of the way. You’ve given a little, but you still got a ways to go with it. You still got a heavy load to carry. I’m sorry about that, truly I am. I didn’t know when we first met down at the creek that you was gonna have as much weight on your shoulders. I wish it was different, but it ain’t. It’s all on you. We’ll be backin’ you up, but you still the one’s gotta step out in front with it.”

  Slim sighed. “You know,” he said. “It’s funny, but in a way, that’s what I wanted. Not with my mind, maybe, but with my heart. As long as you and Nadine believe me, I can do it, or at least, I can do my best. Being scared isn’t nothin’. I’ve lived most of my life scared of one thing or another. Still managed to get up and around. I guess I will this time, too.”

  “There you go,” Progress said.

  Their food came at last, and they ate silently, listening to the conversations around them. Folks were worried, they could tell, but generally in good spirits. Slim heard his own name mentioned several times, and that puzzled him. How could these people know him? Or was he, in fact, a mysterious figure, a name they’d heard mentioned as being a part of it all? Did they, any of them, know what was really going on? Were they all good guys, or were there a few Vipers in the crowd?

  As he ate the last of his hamburger, Slim tried to calm his harried thoughts. He should be excited. He’d be up on stage tomorrow, playing the living blues for a festival crowd that wanted to hear it. If he lived. He’d never thought much about his own mortality, nor did he now. People, he thought, spent far too much time worrying about dying, and didn’t leave much room for living. Right now, he had about everything he wanted. Room to move, music to play, a woman to love, friends and adventure. He had a whole new world to discover. So why, he wondered, was he so much more interested in trying to figure out what was going on inside himself?

  “We best be heading for the tents,” Progress said. “We gots one big tent, figured it’d be safer that way. It’s partitioned off, so you kids’ll have privacy. Belizaire’s comin’ along later on. Mother Phillips is here, takin’ care of her business. Heap of Bears is off in that metal eyesore of his, drummin’ and walkin’ and whatever else he does, puttin’ his own whammy on the whole shebang. Eli is—well, he’s Eli, you know how he is. He’ll be there when we need him. It ain’t the best situation in the world, but we figured it was the safest. For now, we’ll get you settled in and then you can have time to rehearse a little.”

  “What are we gonna play?” Slim asked. “I mean, it doesn’t seem to me like this is the kind of situation where anything will work if we just jam. And I haven’t played with any of y’all before, so what’s what?”

  “That’s gonna be up to you, son. It’s your gig, you gots to pick the songs. We can play along with most
anything, just compin’, you know. When it’s time for you to stand out, though, you gots to be goin’ with what you know. You the one’s gotta do the pickin’. Me and the boys and Nadine, I s’pect we all know about the same songs, so we’ll just stand and rehearse and then you and us can figure out what we wanna do. Fair enough?”

  “I suppose so. It’s just that, right now, my mind isn’t thinking much about songs.”

  “Aw, son,” Progress said. He smiled broadly and, even in the dim light of the tent, his teeth flashed brightly gold. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just one-take Johnsons. Just do it. You was born for the blues, son. I can feel it. You just been sidetracked by all this mess. Once you start playin’, you’ll know where you are. Just remember, life don’t be no rehearsal. Don’t hurt nobody who don’t hurt you first. Don’t hurt yourself, dress nice and go on all the rides. Nothin’ to fret about. This be a barrelhouse town, son. These folks a-comin’ out here, they’re wantin’ the real blues. That’s gonna inspire you to come up with what you need. Just use your common sense.”

  “You got it,” Slim said happily. “Though no one’s ever accused me of having common sense before. I dunno. I’ll crank it up to patent applied for and kick ass. Don’t know any other way to do it.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Nadine said, tickling him.

  “Yeah—why, they’ve trifled with the wrong alert, steel-nerved chap, this time.”

  “Now wait a minute, baby,” Nadine said, intensifying her tickling by going to the use of both hands on his ribs, which she knew from experience were a particularly tickle sensitive part of his body. “Let’s not strain the old brain pan with attic wit, huh.”

  “Oh, just you wait, Nadine. Right there—I’ll think up a retort. I’ll come back at you like lightning—you’ll be sick at your stomach with sheer envy at my wittery.”

  “Say,” Nadine said, trying to hold in her own laughter and generally having as dismal a success at it as Slim. “I bet you think you have almost human intelligence, don’t you?”

  “Hey, it takes a lot of thought to appear swayve and deboner.”

  “I’ll deboner you, sucker. I don’t mind you crying on my shoulder, but your nose is dripping on my neck.”

  Slim turned to Progress and held his hand up to his mouth confidentially. “I don’t know about you,” he said in a stage whisper, “but I think there’s some cahootenizing going on here.”

  “That goes for me, too,” Nadine said in mock indignation. “Though we’re enemies, we’re bonded by the bounds of friendship and true love.”

  “Right,” Slim replied. “We’re fellow bounders.”

  The two of them fell into each other’s arms laughing wildly. They paid no attention to anyone else in the tent as their hands squeezed and tickled and touched. Nor did they see the happy smile on Progress’ bruised face, or hear his sigh of relief. Nor did they hear him say to himself, “Good, things are back to normal, almost.”

  20

  The blues, like the dream, continues to retain its rights—even if its future is uncertain. We see in it an appeal to close the shutters on a withered concept of virtue and a harsh and oppressive civilization; we see in it a demand for non-repression, elaborated by the images of a capacity for fantasy that has not been crushed. We see in it one of the few modern . . . poetic voices through which humanity has fiercely fought for, and managed to regain, a semblance of its true dignity.

  —Paul Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit

  Slim stood on stage, ready to play. Nadine was on his left, ready to sing with him. Progress held his right down, playing rhythm guitar. Belizaire stood in the background, hefting the biggest, heaviest-looking bass Slim had ever seen.

  It looked to be made of bone, but no bone could possibly be that large or flat. Two of Elijigbo’s drummers held the floor down. Progress had asked him if he wanted a keyboard player, but Slim had declined. He’d always found keyboards disruptive and dissonant in the kind of blues he wanted to play.

  An odd hush had fallen over the festival town. Many of the people had gathered on what Slim had always thought of as the threshing floor, where the gate usually stood or sat. He knew they were waiting to see what the new boy had. He and Nadine had made love and smoked a joint beforehand, but he was still nervous. It was a new feeling for him. The stage had always been home for him, the place he was at his best. He’d always been ready and steady on the stage.

  In the old days, friends like Fogarty and McKee and Sunflower had said he was the only human being alive who never suffered from stage fright, and that fact, they said, made them wonder about his humanity. It had been a good joke, then. But now, he was nervous on stage for the first time in his life.

  Songs. He needed songs. The sound men were tweaking the boards, the band was ready to play, Nadine was ready to sing. And Slim’s fingers were itching.

  “Son,” Progress said. “You know what you wanna play?”

  “Yeah, I guess. You wanna make a list?”

  Progress pulled out a frayed old notebook and a stubby, chewed pencil. “Okay,” he said. “Shoot it to me.”

  “Let’s see,” Slim said. “You tell me if you don’t know any of these. Uhm, ‘Dust My Blues,’ ‘Alberta,’ ‘Two Trains Runnin’,’ ‘Lend Me Your Love,’ ‘Worried About My Baby,’ ‘Ridin’ in the Moonlight,’ ‘Spoonful,’ and maybe ‘The Red Rooster.’ That seem like a good set?”

  “S’copacetic with me,” Progress said. “Ain’t none of ’em we don’t know well enough. What you wanna start with?”

  “How about ‘Dust My Blues’? Who did it here in Tejas?”

  “Man named James Son Thomas,” Progress said.

  “In my world, it was a cat named Elmore James. Bad, bad player.” Slim hitched his guitar up to playing position, “Let’s do it,” he said.

  He started out with the twelfth-fret hammer and slide that Elmore used so much, setting up the rhythm and the groove for Nadine to jump into.

  “I’m gonna get up in the mornin’,” she sang. “I believe I’ll dust my blues.”

  Slim played a little passing riff in the change from E to A. Just enough to accentuate the positive.

  “I’m gonna get up in the mornin’,

  I believe I’ll dust my blues.

  I gotta leave my baby,

  I got no time to lose.”

  Slim hammered on the twelve again, listening to the monitors to see how he sounded, then he smoothed down as Nadine went into the second verse. Sometimes he was a busy player, injecting grace notes into the spaces, but something was making him lay back. The amp? It sounded good, distorted just right to add a little dirtiness to the tones. But he felt a reluctance to play any of the passing riffs he was used to, any notes that weren’t the right ones. That seemed all right, though. Not worth fighting about.

  Nadine was tearing the song up. Slim had never heard a woman sing it before, but Nadine was getting down low and wet, making her voice cut through. He was impressed. He’d heard some mighty fine blues singers in his time, but Nadine had the kind of voice that a player dreams of working with, the kind of voice that jumps right into the groove and grabs people by the balls, be they male or female. Now, he could understand her deep need, her attitude about the power and wanting it to be all her behind the music.

  He could feel the power rising in him, softly and easily, growing in his gut and flowing out into his mind and fingers. He could feel it passing into the strings, into the guitar, and from there, into the amp. And somehow, by some quirky feedback loop between the speakers and the pickups on the guitar, the amp was feeding the power back to him. He could see how people would think the amp was fighting them. It was uncomfortable and devious, but he laid back and tried to accept it. When he relaxed and let it go, he could loosen up more, and play in his own style.

  The song ended, and he called out, “Red Rooster,” and the band segued right into it. The music snapped and popped and growled and slinked and left a little more room for him to play. He started adding grac
e notes and using the strings to get the chicken scratch and cat strut sounds that he used to make the song his own.

  Nadine almost crooned the old song. Her voice was low and soft and deep. He watched her knees bend and her ass shake as she reached down into herself to grab on to the arrogance and slyness the song needed. He watched her thrust her hips out as she slywalked to the groove, bending and shaking with the words. He quickly pulled his pocketknife out of his pants. He’d filed down and polished the backside, and when his solo was ready to stand forward, he used it to play slide, trying to duplicate on strings the rhythm of the song, and the slow, languid way he played slide, it came out as what he called “fuck music.” He called it that, he and others, because you couldn’t hear the groove and the lowdown slide without thinking of steamy, hot sex. He liked it, and the smile on Nadine’s face as she laid back to give him room told him that she liked it as well.

  They finished off the “Rooster,” and he started fingertapping the nine-note hook riff for “Spoonful.” He laid a heavy sustain and vibrato on the lingering eighth note. He’d been told he had a strange vibrato. Most players shifted and bent the string up and down. Slim had taken his vibrato from violin players, stretching the string back and forth sideways. People had tried to tell him that, with steel strings, it took too much strength for too little effect, but he liked the subtlety and distinction of it.

  He stepped up to the mike and motioned to Nadine to let him sing. He didn’t do it often, but “Spoonful” had always been one of his favorite songs. He tried to pitch his voice low and quiet, where he thought it sounded decent. He knew he couldn’t come close to anything anyone would actually call singing, but he had heart and enjoyed it. It was, after all, just a rehearsal. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t sung before. He could pass if he didn’t push it, and there were a few songs he could pull off without falling down.

  “Well, it might be a spoonful of diamonds,