The Gutbucket Quest Read online

  But he hadn’t had a gig in more than a month. Even the welcome, if infrequent, royalty checks were getting thin. It just didn’t seem to be the season for the blues. Not for playing them, at least. So he’d spent the empty time studying the wild Texas plains environment, trying to soak it in, make it a part of his playing, as if just by being there he could turn its existence into a sound, a style he was looking for.

  He’d come to the plains first in winter, dug in against the chill and the snow and constant brownness. It had been worth the wait and the trouble. Spring hadn’t sprung, it had exploded. It had been as if he’d woken up one morning to a world turned suddenly green. The land had been more alive each day that passed. The mesquite, the salt cedar, the cottonwoods and willows grew from skeletal barrenness to startling verdancy.

  Quail hunted small prey in his front yard and the Godawful ugly crane that lived up the creek flew close to the house. Horned toads scattered from the paths his feet took. Millions of ants built their sand castles in the red dirt, hauling what were, to them, massive pieces of wood and branch to cover and conceal the entrances. The tarantulas were comfy in their holes awaiting unwary beetles whose empty shells were scattered on the excavated dirt like wilted lettuce leaves on a midden.

  It wasn’t until later, near summer, that Slim had seen the glittering black tarantula wasps that preyed on the beautiful, dignified spiders. They were flying black widows, parasites, poisonous and evil, in Slim’s eyes. Over the course of the season, he had rescued several paralyzed tarantulas from their hideous fates, from the devouring wasp larvae.

  His cat, Minnie, had, in her proper time, climbed up onto his bed at two o’clock in the morning, clambered onto his lap, panting, and presented him with three grandkittens. Then, once the kits were weaned, she had run away. Even the stupid-looking snake he had found and played with had escaped and was living behind the stereo cabinet where it seemed content to stay, maintaining a curious, uneasy truce with the rambunctious kittens.

  Slim was most fascinated by the wolf spiders, the friendly, beautiful, fearless wolves that lived in nearly every window, nook and cranny of the house. He loved spiders, always had, but the wolf spiders were almost like a species apart from any others he’d known. They were frighteningly intelligent and, from observation and testing, he knew they had eyes that could see movement, at least up to ten feet away. He’d watched their stillness as they’d watched flies, their slow creeping and stalking, the massive leaps and pounces when moves were finally made on the unknowing flies. And he’d watched them eat, daintily, unselfconsciously, wondering at their sentience. They were the only spiders he’d ever seen that stalked and hunted, and he wondered if that activity was the cause of their obvious intelligence.

  Slim had been absurdly excited when, one day, he’d spied a reclusive newt scurrying across a bare patch of dirt. And he’d been delighted, on his frequent walks down to the creek, to usually find an old box turtle or two to say hello to and pass a little time with. He was thrilled the first time he’d seen a dozen or more Fuller’s hawks on their wild mating flight, and there was a deep contentment in witnessing the high, silent flight of the eagle that lived in the rocky cliff down the creek.

  He knew that when outstaters though of Texans, his part of Texas, they thought only of dust and desolation, rednecks and rifles, oil wells and Alamos and flags. He’d been surprised, himself, upon moving there, unprepared for the wild beauty, the hundred-mile horizons. He’d also been unprepared for the savage glory of the Texas lightning storms, the rumbling travel of the thunder.

  He’d moved to Texas to play the blues. Not the popular blues; homogenized, synthesized and zombilized. The real, down-home, Gutbucket blues that caught hold of the primal skill and power the blues could hold in the right hands. But, in his ignorance of Texas, he’d ended up in a place so blue it didn’t even have a blues scene, didn’t have any respect for the music or the players.

  “Damn” he said out loud, tossing a rock down the road as he turned into the driveway of his house. “I wish I could get inside something for a change. Wish I could find a way just to play the music.”

  He truly didn’t think he was asking so much. It had been so easy, back then, in the old days. It had come so fast he hadn’t even had time to realize what was happening. He’d started the band in high school and, after graduation, had quickly gotten recording contracts, money and fame. They’d been San Francisco’s own bad boys, even in the wild days of the sixties. Managed by a Hell’s Angel, they’d been said to have the longest hair, the biggest amps and the baddest attitudes in the business. Named after a kind of LSD, they were the loudest band in history. Their first album had been recorded on a pier, the studio unable to contain the chaos of the blues they’d played. The only band to have been barred from the Fillmore for excessive volume, people said the music started shaking their guts blocks away from the halls and arenas.

  But the money, the fame, the women had twisted his life and he’d left the business to try to be “respectable.” But the women he loved always left him, no matter what he tried or did, and each time his heart broke it let more and more of the hunger escape. The hunger to stand onstage and sway to the music, to climb on the strings and lose himself in the sound and fury. Each crack in his seldom repaired heart let the hunger grow and begin to consume him.

  After his last lover had left him—money, as always—he’d started taking side gigs he wouldn’t have considered before, getting money together, planning his move to a Texas that had assumed nearly mythic proportions in his mind. A Texas where he thought he could find his blues, maybe even find himself. Perhaps find a love he could hold on to. But the hunger wasn’t assuaged and the blues weren’t to be found. Slim wanted to feel—well, he didn’t know what he wanted to feel. There was just a brightness and a breathlessness inside him that didn’t belong and often caused him to feel inept and ignorant.

  He wanted to do something grand, something huge and heroic, wanted to pour his feelings, his loves and pains, his life, his small victories and little deaths into the thin silver strings of his guitar. He wanted to touch the magic of the blues and he wanted to love someone who would love him back the same.

  But something was missing. There was something he didn’t have a handle on. He didn’t know what it was, he only knew it was there.

  He was entirely alone, except for his animal friends, and he was dying of it, he felt. Twenty-some miles from town, he’d been unprepared for the isolation, the loneliness, the alienation of living that far up the country. Sometimes he wanted to scream from the hurtful need to touch and hold someone, to make love, to have someone else there; to, for God’s sake, talk to somebody. It was a summer of dreadful speculations, hopes and realizations. It was a summer of painful discontent and restlessness, a summer of hunger, a summer like no other he had lived.

  Once inside the house, back in the coolness, Slim wondered what to do with himself. While thinking about it, he fixed a glass of ice water and petted the cats. He could sit down and work. Groups like Cities in Pain, Boots V Jeans and the Oscars were all waiting with what he visualized as signed, sweaty checks for the songs he was supposed to be writing for them. He had a talent for songwriting that at least helped support his life, but the puerile rock-and-roll material the bands wanted didn’t fit the mood he was in. He had, as he often did, the blues.

  He loved rock and roll, sort of. But it didn’t have the feeling, the emotional content of the blues. Rock and roll could make you dance, but blues could make you sweat. Rock and roll could talk about the pain and joy of loving, but blues could make you feel it. A good blues player could, with just his fingers and strings, express the sound of falling tears, the ripping of a broken heart, the poverty of being alone. A blues player could create the sound of hot, liquid sex, the swing and sway of a woman’s walk, the curve of a breast, the tickling laughter of a feminine voice. And Slim hoped, someday, to be a good enough player to begin to find the voices he needed and wanted so badly, the vo
ice it felt as if he’d spent most of his sad life searching for.

  The sound of far-off thunder caressed the sky and Slim went outside again to look. Clouds were swiftly moving in, but it didn’t look or smell like rain. A dry storm. Good. He went back inside and grabbed the black, maple-necked, Ibanez strat that was his favorite guitar. Then he headed down to the creek.

  Slim had a dream. Or a fantasy, perhaps, though it seemed more possible of realization than a fantasy. He wanted to learn to play the lightning and the thunder, to capture on guitar the flash and crack and heat, the instantaneity of a close lightning strike, the rumbling rolling threat of the thunder as it moved from cloud to cloud.

  He’d watched the lightning, loved it, studied it with the dedication of a scientist. He felt he knew things about the lightning that no one else in the world could know. Scientists had said for years that lightning actually started on the ground and flashed up to the sky. Most people didn’t believe it, not really, and scientists, like everyone else, were too afraid of death to stand out in the light to actually study the phenomenon. But Slim had seen it, had truly seen it move upward, reaching to the angry clouds, a fern-frond of light and heat and potential destruction. And he knew, because of the massive Texas horizons, that it wasn’t half the time, it really was all the time. Because he knew, he’d seen that lightning started on the ground and arced through the sky to strike downward at the Earth, ten or twenty or thirty miles away.

  And he could look up at the giant sky cloaked with black thunderclouds, and he could feel where the next strike would be. It was a kind of magic, he thought. Testing himself, he had once stood within fifteen feet of a massive strikedown. He had felt the unbelievable heat, had been shaken and deafened by the bomb-blast of the sound, had seen, in aftervision, the ball of energy and radiation that had formed for an instant where the lightning had touched and moved through the Earth. It had almost knocked him over, and it had scared the shit out of him.

  He could feel the pressure of the clouds above him as he walked down to the creek. Over what he thought were hundreds or thousands of years, the small creek had dug a respectable gully on his side of the bank. It was, in fact, the beginnings of a cliffside. But on the other bank, the land was flat and gently sloping. If one walked a little way down the creek, it took an odd twist and the cliffs grew on the opposite side, so that if one were to travel the creek from beginning to end, cliff and flatland would alternate sides.

  And suddenly it had happened: the lightning strike. It had launched him not into death, not into the next county, but into what seemed to be another aspect of reality. And he still had no idea what to make of it.

  3

  Blues is like a doctor. A blues player. . . plays for the worried people . . . See, they enjoy it. Like the doctor works from the outsides to the insides of the body. But the blues works on the insides of the insides . . .

  —Roosevelt Sykes, blues pianist

  Progress wasted no time beginning Slim’s education. After a ham-and-egg breakfast, he started in about the music and about Slim.

  “I don’t want to make no big thing of it, but I gots a feeling that you didn’t just come here for no reason. Not just by chance, no pun.”

  “It was dumb luck that that lightning caught me,” Slim Chance said. “If I had been walking just a little slower, or faster, it would have missed me. And it was dumber luck that it knocked me here instead of frying me.”

  “I don’t think so. Things like that don’t just happen. You came here ‘cause you were destined to come here; how it happened don’t much matter. And I’m not sure it’s good.”

  “Progress, I swear I never planned this, and I mean no harm to you or anyone here”

  The man lifted a hand, smiling. “I know that, Slim. I know you’re innocent. But there’s somethin’ else, somethin’ behind this, maybe making you a pawn, or maybe a decoy duck, and that’s what I’m frankly nervous about. Somethin’ I don’t understand.”

  “If you feel that way, I’ll get right out of here! I’m not looking to bring anybody any mischief”

  But Progress’ hand was on Slim’s shoulder, firmly. “Don’t you budge. Whatever it is, I’ll figure it out by and by, and then we’ll know what to do about it. But meanwhile, I don’t think it’s smart to waste any time, ‘cause we don’t know how much you got to know how fast.”

  Slim began to feel an apprehension. He had not known Progress long, but already he trusted the man’s judgment implicitly. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do my best. But I hope I can get to play the blues. Really play them, I mean.”

  “Son,” Progress said. “Fore you can rightly play the blues, you got to know what they is.”

  “I’ve had the blues,” Slim said. “I’m surprised my skin’s not purple as much as I’ve had the blues.”

  Progress chuckled. “I can see that, son. But havin’ the blues and understandin’ ‘em is two different things entire.”

  “Okay, so how do I understand them? What do I do?”

  “Well, first you got to know that the blues is the facts of life, the true facts of life. The blues is the bone in the avocado, and if you got no bone, you got no avocado. Your quality got to grow from the ways you find to deal with havin’ the blues. You can be broke and have the blues, you can be hungry and have the blues. If you has a good woman and she quits you, then you knows you got the blues. There’s lots of ways to have the blues.”

  “My way is that one with the good woman,” Slim said. “I have no end of problems with those particular blues.”

  “Yessir, that’s just about the way it is with most men.” The broad, golden smile never left Progress’ face. As deep a bluesman as he was, as much as he obviously knew about life’s pains, he seemed to be in constant good humor.

  “Progress,” Slim asked. “How do you stay so happy all the time?”

  “Well, son, there’s folk’ll tell you you cain’t have your cake and pizza, too. But I’ve done pretty good for myself, so I’ve had me about everything I wanted. I got a roof over my head, food to eat, good friends. But I ain’t bound to anything except that groove in my heart. See, I loves people, but it’s the groove that’s happenin’ for me.

  “The blues is a vital and important thing. It changed my life, and I knows it changed lots of other folks’ lives, too. Anybody says otherwise is just a fool talkin’ trash. I know what it feels like to be down and alone and, whoo, that music got the power to make all that go away.”

  “Yeah, but how do I get there from here?” Slim asked. He was fascinated by Progress, awed by his playing and his wisdom, but he was frustrated by his own ignorance. “How do I find it and grab hold of it?”

  “Way I figure it,” Progress said, “maybe that’s why you’re here with me, now. I means to say, most things don’t happen by accident, so you here for a reason, wishin’ and hopin’ maybe. I don’t rightly know. But the blues is somethin’ each person got to figure out for they own selves. A player, now, I never seen one yet couldn’t use some help along the way to it. So maybe that’s why you’re here.

  “You almost got the blues too hard, almost too sad and unhappy to play the blues. Remember, when you play a blues, when you hear a blues song, don’t think the worst of it, think the best of it. ‘Cause when I play the blues, I be feelin’ good. But it got to come from inside you. Like a musk deer. That deer’ll run ass over antlers trying to find out where the smell comes from, but all the time it’s comin’ from its own self. You got all your scales and chops and such?”

  “Yeah,” Slim said. “I got the technical side down.”

  Progress nodded in satisfaction. “Good,” he said. “Me, I know the theory and all. Had enough readin’ players explain it all to me to get where I understood why this or that works. And that’s important, so your fingers know where to go without you havin’ to tell em. But I don’t think about none of it when I’m standin’ up there playin’. I just go from the heart, from the gut.

  “You see, son, you gots t
o understand. Blues is a thread that links experiences. If you listens to a blues player, you’re listenin’ to their lives. The only things you can take away from that are things that echo in your own life. Other than that, everything falls away. Most folks try to find their own lives. But too damn many people try to hide what their true life is and take on somethin’ else. Now you, I don’t think you rightly know what your own life is. I don’t think you been able to find it, but you ain’t took on nothin’ to hide that. I think you been sent here to this world from whichever a one you came from so you can have a whole new life to find out who and what you are. You see?”

  “I guess so,” Slim said. “I don’t know where to start though. I can hardly believe any of this is really happening. I don’t know anything about where I am or what’s going on. I just don’t know where to begin.”

  “Right here, son. Don’t be gettin’ no attitude about any world where you’re welcome is better than where you comes from. This here is a hard world. I ‘spect any world is a hard world, like any other. It’s all in how you walk it, how you talk it, the well of the cuff and the angle of the brim. You gets by the best you can just pluggin’ it in, playin’ it and shuttin’ up.”

  “But that’s all I want to do,” Slim protested. “I just want to play the music.”

  Progress shook his head. For once, the ever-present smile left his face. “Don’t whine, son. That ain’t pretty. You got what you got. I know you wants to play, I can feel it inside you fightin’ to come out. But I thinks you got you a problem, whether you’re here or wherever you came from. Blues got power, mighty power. I think you’re scared of that power. I think you’re afraid that power gonna take you over, gonna change you and make you a different man than you are. And it will, you know it will, so you back off from it. You run away and the feelin’ never gets through you so you can stand up and say what you got to say. But you got to come out from under that shell and start kickin’.”