A Song to Die For (44 page)

“All us guys should ride in the back,” Trusty Joe offered, “so the ladies can ride in the front seat with Luster.”

“Shotgun!” Kathy sang.

“I gotta ride bitch?” Lindsay complained.

“I called shotgun!”

“What's so bad about ridin' next to me?” Luster demanded. “Come on, get in. It ain't that far, anyway.”

*   *   *

Creed spent an hour helping Gus remove the tag axle from the Silver Eagle. Meanwhile, up the road, Gus's brother-in-law cannibalized the tag axle from the bus in his junkyard and hauled it to Gus's shop on a flatbed trailer. Gus's brother-in-law then drove Creed back to mile marker one ninety-seven to find the old wheel and retrieve it for the good tire. They repacked the wheel bearings on the replacement axle and muscled it into place under the bus with some shop dollies. With the new tag axle jacked and bolted in place, they reinstalled the wheels and let the bus down off the jacks about the time the crimson sun dipped down to smooch the desert skyline.

Creed shed his greasy T-shirt at the shop sink, and with a clean dipstick rag and some lava soap, scrubbed the black grease from his hands and face as best he could. He splashed some water in his armpits and around his neck, and scurried into the bus where he changed into some clean clothes. Then he opened a beer and headed for the venue in the mountains. Luster had left directions.

He was tired from the work on the bus, not to mention hours of driving prior to that. Now he was staring a four-hour gig in the face. Oh, well … He wanted to go on the road. He smiled wryly. Nobody could say he hadn't paid some dues.

 

46

CHAPTER

Creed found the Blarney Stone surrounded by pickups and motorcycles, ponderosa pine trees standing beyond the edge of the potholed gravel parking lot. The bar itself seemed to lean a little, but the old wood frame structure pulsed with life, laughter, shouts, and the bass line from the jukebox. Creed stepped out of the bus and smelled tobacco smoke and pine trees as he tucked his forty-five into the back of his pants.

As soon as he walked into The Blarney Stone, Kathy handed him a beer with a smile, and pointed to the stage. The band was waiting, waving him over. Creed waded through a rowdy crowd, stepped up onto the small stage, strapped on his guitar, and kicked the first song with the band. “Wow,” he said, listening to the mix over the sound system. Somebody had spent some money on the PA. The whole bar rang like the inside of a vintage Martin guitar.

From the tiny stage, Creed enjoyed a vantage point from which to get a feel for the joint, which was already Saturday-packed though this was only Wednesday. If anything in the bar had ever been painted, it had long since worn off. With all the cigarette ashes being flicked around, Creed thought it was a miracle the tinder-dry ramshackle tavern had not yet burned down. The old wooden floors were so uneven that crushed beer cans had been shoved under the legs of the single pool table in an attempt to level it out. Here and there, an old car license plate had been nailed to the floor to cover a hole. Scrap lumber had been nailed over the glass windows, with the slots between the boards too narrow to let a fist or a bottle pass, though a few panes had been busted out, presumable with cue sticks. An old woodstove dropped burning coals into the box of sand in which it stood on all fours, for the mountain evening had grown quite cool.

It was one of those places where hundreds of people had nailed, stapled, tied, or otherwise affixed their cheap, gimme ball caps to the rafters to collect cobwebs and mounds of dust. Creed had always detested the practice. It was an insult to the carpenters who had crafted the rafters generations ago. The stuffed heads of deer, elk, and bighorn rams jutting from the walls sported an equal supply of allergens.

The bar patrons represented quite a smattering from the human gene pool. Creed smiled at an ancient Mexican man dancing with a little girl who must have been his great-granddaughter. There were loggers, mountain men, Navaho and Pueblo Indians, cowboys and cowgirls, businessmen in Polo shirts, bikers, a few frat boys with sorority girls hanging on them, two hippie dudes with their hippie chicks huddled fearfully in the corner, several crew cuts from Kirtland Air Force Base, a bunch of retirees wearing T-shirts from the Delaware Airstream Club, and some forest-fire fighters who had just that day put out a stubborn high-country blaze.

The situation had brawl written all over it.

In the middle of the third set, Creed saw the door open, and glanced to judge what form of humanity might be entering now. What the hell? He swore he recognized the guy from Bud's Place, not so long ago. At Bud's, the guy had had his arm in a sling, making Creed suspect him as the masked robber he had shot that night at the Manchaca poker game. There was no sling now, but the guy still carried his arm funny. The Blarney Stone was a long way from Bud's Place.

As Trusty Joe took his fiddle lead on “Dear John Note,” Creed stepped up next to Luster and spoke in his ear.

“You remember that guy I shot at the poker game?”

Luster nodded.

“You remember the guy in the arm sling at Bud's?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“He just walked in.”

Luster's glare shifted to the front door. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Are you carrying?”

“I put my piece in my guitar case.”

“I'd stand near that case if I was you.”

“Roger that.”

As the night went on, the place got rowdier. A couple of shoving matches erupted but were broken up. Creed witnessed something he had never seen from a stage before: two, simultaneous, unrelated hair-pullings, each caused by some jealous jerk suspecting his girl of flirting with some other guy. All the while, he kept his eye on the poker game robber who prowled The Blarney Stone as if seeking some vantage point from which to execute some nefarious deed. Peculiar. At Bud's the guy had constantly drilled Creed with a glare. Now, he seemed to spread his attention out to the other guys in the band, as well. That guy was up to something dastardly.

Finally, in the middle of the fourth set, the hard liquor in some cowboy's veins swelled beyond his small mind's ability to hold it. The cowboy in question poured a full pitcher of beer over a hippie's head in the corner. A skinny little hippie chick then broke a pool cue across the cowboy's jaw. Watching, as he played the lead break for “Chuck Will's Widow,” Creed caught himself thinking that the hippie chick must have played softball in school, because she took a grand slam swing at the redneck, laying him out cold.

What happened next, Creed had witnessed a few times before from elevated stages. It was quite the study in physics. Every action has an equal, opposite reaction. The cowboy whom the hippie chick struck with the pool cue fell over onto a biker who stumbled into a frat boy who turned and shoved back at the biker who then punched the frat boy who then fell back into a fireman who bumped into an airman who turned and shoved back, and so on, until a pitcher of beer poured on a hippie's head had spread across the tavern like ripples from a rock tossed into the corner of a pool of nitroglycerin.

“Just keep playing!” Luster shouted. “Trusty, take another lead!” Then, as two brawlers stumbled toward Lindsay's pedal steel, he stepped in the way to shove the two head-locked goons aside with his boot before they barreled into Lindsay.

“Thank you, LusTAIR, honey.”

“That's my job, LindSAY!” As he continued to strum the rhythm, he eased over toward Creed, a wry grin on his face, as if having the time of his life. “Where's that guy from Bud's?”

Creed pointed with his chin. “Over there getting the shit beat out of him by some logger.” As he watched, he saw the one-armed poker game robber reach under his shirt for what looked like a pistol butt. About the same time, the fight began to spill uncontrollably onto the stage. “Uh-oh,” he said.

Against Luster's order, Creed quit playing and scrambled to his guitar case for his automatic. He flipped the safety off and sent a bullet through several dusty gimme caps, and into the rafters. He knew this was chancy. It could either end the fight, or escalate the violence into a shootout.

Still holding the pistol high for all to see, he watched the fighting come to an abrupt end, and wondered what would happen next. In that moment of silence, Lindsay's gorgeous voice began to sing:

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”

Trusty Joe added a harmony line below the melody. Creed, easing the hammer down to the safety position, took the higher harmony. The tension drained from the crowd. Luster sang melody on the second verse “…
when we've been gone ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun…”
and Lindsay found a soprano harmony line that brought forth tears.

“…
was blind but now I see.
”

“Let us set our differences aside now,” Luster said, like a preacher on a pulpit. “We are all Americans here. All music lovers. Lovers of life. Lovers of freedom. Children of God. Sing with me, children. I think you know the song…”

He strummed a chord and began to sing his most powerful romantic ballad, “Love of All Loves.” And the crowd did know the song, and the erstwhile pugilists eschewed further violence for the sake of the lyrics, and by the end of the top-ten hit, every man who had been knocked down had been lifted up and dusted off, and the show went on.

*   *   *

Later, after the gig, while loading equipment into the bus baggage compartment, Creed noticed a pickup truck with Texas plates idling across the gravel parking lot. It was the same make and model of truck he had seen leave the Manchaca poker game in a cloud of dust after the foiled robbery attempt. He went in for another load, entering the back door of The Blarney Stone just after Trusty Joe and Tump carried out a heavy speaker cabinet, each man lifting a handle on the side of the plywood box.

“You think we'll have roadies some day?” Trusty said.

Tump answered. “I hope we get groupies first, then roadies.”

Inside, Lindsay was meticulously cleaning and stowing her equipment, pausing often to sip a whiskey sour or to take a drag from her Virginia Slim cigarette. She was always the last to load her equipment out and Creed knew she intentionally made slow progress so she wouldn't have to carry any of the equipment other than her own stuff, and even that she usually sweet-talked one of the guys into lugging for her.

Smirking at the prima donna tactics, Creed began wrapping a speaker chord around his palm and elbow, when he heard Trusty shouting at someone out in the parking lot.

“Huh? Can't hear you, man!” In a smaller voice, he asked Tump, “What'd he say?”

“Damned if I know,” Tump replied. “I'm damn near deaf as a post.”

“Hang on,” Trusty shouted.

Creed heard the speaker cabinet settle into the gravel. Growing suspicious, he dropped the chord he had been rolling and stepped out of the back door. He saw Trusty and Tump walking toward the truck with Texas plates.

“Wait, guys!” he shouted, trotting toward his bandmates. As Trusty and Tump turned to face him, the truck's wheels spun gravel across the parking lot and the vehicle shot out of sight down the blacktop road.

“What was all that about?”

Trusty shrugged. “I think he was asking where we played next. Is that what you heard, Tump?”

Tump shrugged.

“Are you really deaf?”

“Huh?”

“No, really?”

“What? Speak up.”

“I said are you deaf!”

“Don't yell at me, man!”

Creed shook his head and walked back into The Blarney Stone. Something smelled fishy, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He could feel his hackles rising, like a wolf scenting a rival. Just then, Kathy stormed out of the back door of the tavern and stomped toward the bus.

“What's she pissed about?” Creed asked Luster, who stepped out behind her with a wad of cash in his hand.

“Oh, the son-of-a-bitch owner shorted us a hundred dollars.”

Creed cringed. “What for? That hole I put in the roof?”

“No. He said we exceeded our unlimited bar tab. Anyway, we got enough cash to get to Vegas. Let's load up, Hoss.”

“Forty-Roger on that, Boss.”

 

47

CHAPTER

“You what?” Franco growled, feeling the surge of anger. He glared at Sling, who was sitting across from him in the plush chairs of Papa Martini's office at The Castilian.

“I almost had him,” Sling claimed. “He was walking up to my truck when that guitar player came out and screwed the whole thing up.”

Franco jumped from his chair and pounced on Sling, grabbing him by the throat, knocking him out of his chair with a rugby field body block, pinning him to the floor. As the empty chair slammed against the floor, Franco drew his fist back, ready to punch.

“Don't hit me in the face,” the underling wheezed. “Not in the face!”

Franco complied by thumping Sling on his broken collarbone, inducing a howl that he quickly choked by clamping the breath out of Sling's trachea. He glared as the idiot gangster wannabe gripped his wrists helplessly, tears streaming from his eyes.

“Your job was to keep an eye on them from a distance. Not to try to do the job yourself. You don't get paid to think. Understand?”

Sling nodded his blue face as best he could with the killer mitts clamped on his throat. Franco turned him loose, got up, and straightened his silk suit as Sling wheezed and coughed on the floor.

“Get up, you bum! Pick up that chair!”

Sling dragged himself to his knees, righted the chair, and used it to pull himself to his feet.

“What did you just learn?”

“I don't get paid to think,” Sling said hoarsely. “Only…”

“Only what?”

“Only, I haven't been paid in a while.”

Franco turned to his father, who had sat and watched the whole confrontation with pride. “You believe this puke, Pop?” He turned back to Sling. “You've got a room in The Castilian, don't you? A meal card, a bar tab?”