The Gutbucket Quest

by Piers Anthony

  And it might be a spoonful of gold,

  But just one spoon of your precious love,

  Satisfies my soul . . .”

  After the first verse, Nadine stepped up and began to sing with him. To his astonishment, she pitched and adjusted her voice somehow, and managed to sing in harmony with him, and it worked. No one had ever done it before, but it worked. He felt, as he and Nadine sang, that the power was about to explode inside him. His dick got hard and his hands seemed to glow red and itch. It felt good. So good that, when his solo came around he cut loose completely, finding a speed and a groove he’d never been behind in his life. He played for twenty-four bars and didn’t want to quit, so the band let him go on jamming.

  Offstage, people were dancing and smiling. Some few stood and stared, caught up by the power in a sort of helplessness. Dust devils formed and spun around the threshing floor, whirling between the dancers, picking up leaves and twigs until they assumed a kind of transient solidity. The trees bowed and swayed and rustled, leaning toward the stage as even they began to swing with the groove.

  Nadine stared at him wide-eyed as he hammered down on the riffs that were evolving under his fingers. It was as if each note he played was the culmination and sum of every note that had come before, and the partial exposition of each note that was yet to come. Slim’s eyes were closed and he was playing to Nadine, unaware that the playing had, for that moment in time, brought the entire festival city to a laughing, dancing halt. He had surrendered without knowing it, he was in control without awareness. A mystic would have called it enlightenment, but Slim wasn’t conscious of any great happening. In giving his heart to Nadine, playing for her, he opened the rest of himself up to the power, and let it flow out of him. He only played.

  He took his scale down to a diminished seventh, remembering the Climax Blues Band version of the song. For the first time in his life, he played into what most people in his world would have called jazz. He didn’t think about it, didn’t call it by any name, he just played through, following the notes that seemed to build by themselves. The playing was slower, more tentative, because of unfamiliarity. But it seemed to smooth the frenetic power his playing had created. The dust devils fell apart into powder, the dancers slowed and stopped. People began to once again go about their business. Slim finally felt the power leave him. He let go of it without reluctance, completed, and the band let the song end.

  Slim turned to Progress. “That was pretty good, huh?”

  The band broke into wild laughter. Belizaire fell to the ground, his raucous guffaws ringing out over all the others. Progress was breathless and teary-eyed from it. Even Nadine was laughing. Slim looked around at them, puzzled.

  “What is this?” he said. “What’s so funny?”

  Progress worked hard to catch his breath. “Oh my,” he said, the laughter still in his eyes and barely gone from his voice. He un-strapped his guitar and stood it in a stand. Slim did the same. Progress walked over to him and put his arm around Slim’s shoulders.

  “Son,” he said, still chuckling. “You just knocked this whole festival into a rocked hat. You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “You just here and now played with more power than anyone I ever did see. You had every single man, woman and child here in the palm of your hand. You coulda done anything.”

  Slim walked around in circles. Then he grabbed Nadine’s hand, held it, and faced Progress again.

  “All I did was play,” he said. “I was just playing for Nadine, ’cause she sang with me.”

  “That’s just the point, son. You didn’t care about the power, so you just let it go, you surrendered. Once you did that, nothin’ else mattered. Whoo, boy! You did some playin’. I ain’t never seen nobody reach out the power like that.”

  “Was it good?” Slim asked timidly.

  “Good?” Progress said incredulously. “Good? Son, if you’d had the Gutbucket in those hands, you’d have about torn the place up entire. They’d have been dancin’ and standin’ all the way into town. Good?” Progress laughed again. “Yep, it was good. It was good enough that, fearful as I is, I can hardly wait for tomorrow, when it’s our time to play.”

  “Don’t we need to rehearse more?” Slim asked.

  “Not after that. I don’t think none of us is ready to play no more behind that. You just be thinkin’ of good songs you can pick.” Progress shifted his attention to Nadine, who had been standing quietly at Slim’s side. “Nadine, honey,” he said. “Seems like as if you set it up for Slim. You want to try to figure out how you can do the same thing tomorrow?”

  “Sure Daddy,” she said. “My man and I won’t let you down.”

  Her man, Slim thought. He liked the sound of possessiveness in her voice, liked the attitude the phrase conveyed.

  “Well, chillen,” Progress said tiredly. “I gots to go get me some rest and talk to some folks about this and that. You two go on ahead and have some fun. Meet some of the peoples that done come out here.” He walked off with Belizaire, leaving Slim and Nadine standing alone on stage.

  “So, what now?” Slim said.

  Nadine shrugged, the motion of her shoulders giving her breasts a delightful bounce. “What do you want to do?” she asked him.

  “Well,” he said. “I have two things in mind.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said, looking at him through one cocked eye, her suspicions clear.

  “We could go skinny dippin’ and make love in the river,” he said. “Or we could go get something to eat. Now me, I don’t know which I’d rather do. I’m hot and horny and I’d dearly love a swim and a swive. On the other hand, I’m starving to death, too. What do you think.”

  “Race you to the river,” Nadine said, already starting to run.

  She won the race. But Slim, despite his extra weight and short legs, wasn’t far behind.

  21

  They intimidate each other, shrug off and ignore each other, groove on and with each other. Equal moves from all directions come out of this pressure, further insuring the same total nibbling at the entire cosmic scene—where everything is relevant because everything is visible, and nothing is relevant because visibility is nothing and nothing is everything, everything appears as hint because nothing is there, and there are no hints because everything is there. And the blues is all.

  —Richard Meltzer, The Super Super Blues Band

  Nadine?” Slim said.

  “Yes, baby.”

  They were lying naked on a blanket at the edge of the river, watching the sun go down and enjoying their wet coolness in the diminishing heat of the day. Mother Phillips’ gang were still playing in the water, so no one in particular paid any attention to them, and their nudity went unnoticed and uncommented on.

  “Did I do good?” Slim asked shyly. “With the playing, I mean?”

  “Slim,” Nadine said. “I think you played just great.”

  Slim looked closely at her face. He seemed to see pride and admiration in her eyes. At least he interpreted it as such. It wasn’t something he had ever seen in any woman’s eyes before when they had looked at him. “Thanks for singing with me,” he said.

  Nadine chuckled good-naturedly. “Well,” she said, “I couldn’t leave you up there all alone.”

  “Yeah.” Slim laughed, too. “I know I don’t sing too well. But it’s fun, you know. I really enjoy it. And when you sang with me, it was the first time in my whole life that I felt like I was any good at it—that I thought it sounded okay. It was really a nice thing for you to do. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Nadine said. She moved to lie on top of him, looking down into his eyes. “I could see you wanted to sing,” she said. “I know what it’s like to want to so bad. And I wanted to play and see if we could sing together.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “How come?” He shifted beneath her so that all the bumps and grooves of their bodies fit into each other more comfortably with her pressing down on him. The small bumps o
f her breasts and nipples adjusted themselves, with a little help from her, so that they matched his own sensitive nipples, kissing tip to tip and teasing. They had already made love in the water, so there was no real need in either of them, just a sheer enjoyment of the feel of each other’s bodies. Slim stopped, only for a moment, to wonder how they’d become so comfortable with each other that they could be naked on the shore, intimate, in front of other people without being self-conscious about it.

  “Why’d you need to see if we could sing together?” he persisted.

  “Promise you won’t tell anyone until I’m ready to?” she said, blushing.

  “Who would I tell?”

  “Okay. I guess it’s not that important. See, I have some songs that I’ve been writing. No music, just lyrics. But they’re written for a man and a woman to sing together. I was hoping—well, that you and I might be able to do them together after all this is over. You can write the music, I know you can. And the words are pretty good, I think.”

  “Great,” Slim said, excited. Creativity in women, their assertion of intelligence and skill, had always turned him on and, in his own clumsy way, he’d always tried to encourage it. “Why don’t we do one of them here tomorrow?”

  “But—”

  “No, listen. Progress said for you to think of a way to set me up, to help build up the power. Right? Neither one of us can do it alone. And I can’t think of any way that’s better for me than us singing together. Man, that would make me about bust with it.”

  “But there’s no music,” Nadine protested.

  “Oh, come on. Music’s the easy part. Just come up with an intro and a hook riff and set it for a standard twelve- or twenty-four-bar progression. It’d take about five minutes to fix it with the band so we could at least play a rough version of it. It’s not the music that gets the power for us, it’s the singing together.”

  “But wouldn’t it be just the same if we sang a song we already knew?”

  “Probably,” Slim said. “But I want to hear your songs.”

  “That’s really what you want?” Nadine asked.

  “Yeah. Everybody keeps saying that it’s all up to me. So there, I’ve made a decision. Let’s do it.”

  “Okay,” she said, sighing. “For you it’s okay.” She wriggled against him. Though there was still no need for sex, there was a definite trend growing.

  “Now that’s what I like to see.”

  Slim and Nadine looked up at Mother Phillips’ wizened body. The old woman stood with her hands on her hips, smiling down at them.

  “Nothing I like to see more than good, clean lust,” she said, sitting on the sand beside them.

  “I see you two have gotten all the shyness out of your systems. My, I do enjoy seeing young people in love. Are you happy with each other? Everything fit?”

  “So far, so good,” Nadine said.

  “Wonderful” It was hard to be unhappy or worried around Mother Phillips and her unbridled enthusiasm and joy for life. “I just knew you two were meant for each other,” she said. “Why don’t you come to our tent and we’ll have a few beers and some grub. You hungry?”

  “Starved,” Slim said. Nadine nodded her head in agreement.

  Mother Phillips stood and brushed her wrinkledy butt off. Nadine got off Slim and they stood beside the old woman, dressing, then following, hand in hand, as Mother Phillips led the way to the tent where her group was quartered for the duration.

  “Would you kids like to get married?” she asked offhandedly. “I can do that, you know. The nation of Tejas, in its wisdom and nearsightedness, lets me have a license to commit marriages and funerals.”

  Slim was taken aback. He hadn’t thought about marriage at all. But when Mother Phillips mentioned it, he suddenly knew that was what he wanted more than anything.

  “Nadine?” he asked, hoping.

  “I’m game if you are,” she said, laughing happily.

  “You’re both pretty gamey if you ask me,” Mother Phillips quipped. “But how about getting married? You want to?”

  “I think we do,” Slim said. “Yeah. I think we’d like that a lot.” He put his arm around Nadine’s shoulders and pulled her close to him, their hips bumping as they walked.

  “Well, come on then,” Mother Phillips said. “Why don’t you get some chow. I’ll get these old bones around and tell everybody and get things ready. Oh my, this is going to be some festival.”

  . . .

  The wedding was to be onstage, under a full moon. Slim wondered if Progress had known the moon would be full when he’d set up the festival date. Probably, he decided. Mother Phillips had sent some of her people back to Tralfaz for a pickupload of fresh oak leaves, pine branches, flowers and bushels of fresh vegetables. Then they had dressed the stage until, now, it looked like a quiet forest clearing and smelled almost too wild and fresh to bear. The moon and stars provided all the light that would be needed.

  People had gathered on the threshing floor, a marriage evidently a big event for the temporary community. All the celebrants, save Slim and Nadine, were gathered on the stage under a circle of pine branches and flowers. Elijigbo’s band played a soft, strange music that echoed off into the night and the river. Some of Mother Phillips’ people accompanied them on simple wooden flutes and bells.

  Except for Progress and the band, everyone was naked, both on stage and down on the threshing floor. Slim and Nadine walked hand in hand toward Mother Phillips from offstage. Their small fears and apprehensions seemed to evaporate with the sound their feet made in the crackling leaves that covered the stage. People cheered as they walked. Then Slim and Nadine stopped, to stand, still holding hands, before Mother Phillips.

  The old woman seemed to glow in the moonlight as she nodded her head, smiling. She turned and poured a clear red wine into a large wooden goblet.

  “Spirits of the East,” she said, turning in that direction, “close the circle. Bless and protect this gathering.” She poured a little of the wine onto the floor, and then took a small drink. “Spirits of the South,” she said, repeating her previous motions, “close the circle. Bless and protect this gathering.” She did the same for the West and the North, then handed the goblet to Slim and Nadine to drink the remaining wine it contained.

  A group of women stood forward and began to chant in harmony:

  “Mother of all,

  Oh, Goddess divine,

  Whose spiral spins,

  Through all of time,

  Be with us now,

  And never part,

  Forever dwell here in our hearts.

  “She is the source,

  The mystery deep,

  The inspiring song,

  Protecting sleep,

  From her we come,

  To her return,

  None greater is,

  Than she who lives.”

  Many of the people on the threshing floor joined in the chant, giving it a power that affected Slim more than he would have expected. Several women of varying ages stepped forward and began to recite in joyful voices.

  “Maiden Mother,

  Mother of all,

  Goddess Mother,

  Three aspects of our Great Mother’s face,

  Be with us now,

  Fill us all with

  Your power and grace.

  “Goddess Mother,

  Swift and smart,

  Bring your joy,

  Into our hearts,

  Mother of all,

  Full of life,

  Surround us now,

  With brilliant light.

  “Goddess Mother,

  Old and wise,

  Teach us your secrets,

  Of Earth and sky.”

  The women stepped back and left a void of silence in their wake. Mother Phillips stood once again in center stage.

  “We ask the Goddess to bless and protect us,” she intoned, “as we bind these two, male and female, in body, heart, mind, and soul. We ask our community to help and support the
m as they bind each to the other. We ask the Gods of all beliefs to smile on them as they struggle to live lives bound in love. And we ask our Mother the Earth to share her bounty with them, so that their lives may be full.”

  She turned solemnly to Slim and Nadine. “Do you swear, now,” she said, with only a small twinkle in her eye, “to love only one another, to share hearts and lives, neither outshining the other, but as equals before the Goddess and the community?”

  “We do,” they said, together.

  “Do you swear, now, to treat our Mother, the Earth, with love, to treat the people of the community with respect, and to treat each other with gentleness and compassion, always trying to understand each other?”

  “We do.”

  “Then, in the name of the Goddess, in the presence of the community, and with the blessing of our Mother the Earth, I declare to all present that you are now bound together, in love and in life. You are married.”

  The crowd on the threshing floor began to cheer and the party was full on. Slim looked at Mother Phillips.

  “Is that all?” he asked, bemused.

  “Yep,” she said. “There’s not a thing hard about it. It just takes making the vows in front of the community.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Nadine had reached down and, almost unconsciously, was playing with his dick. He reached for her breast and looked around. Nearly all the people on stage and in the crowd were in various stages of love-making. Even Progress, still mostly dressed, was nuzzling Mother Phillips’ neck as she worked to undo the buttons on his jeans. Bowing to the inevitable, Slim and Nadine slid down onto the oak leaves, making slow, gentle love along with the community. Each couple present made love in a world of its own, yet each was aware of every other, and there was an energy, a power that built and covered them, an energy that felt as old as the Earth itself.

  As the orgy, or so Slim thought of it, wound down, some of Mother Phillips’ people began passing out plates of raw fruit and vegetables, washed in the river, chilled, sliced and delicious. Mitchell brought up two huge pots of steaming chili and pans of corn bread. Someone turned the stage lights on and Elijigbo’s band began to play dancing music. People that Slim knew, or had met, and many he didn’t and hadn’t, came up, one by one, to give him and Nadine presents and good wishes. A pile quickly grew beside them, of clothing, crafts, guitar equipment, coupons and promises for services, invitations, bedding, even a few certified offers for gigs and one recording contract, open ended.