Gutbucket Quest (18 page)

And now, there was Nadine. Caught and trapped and depending on
him.
He couldn’t let her down as he’d let down so many of the other women he’d loved. But how could he think? What could he do? His mind was scattered, the power of the machines pressing down on him, tearing at him with sparked claws, confusing his mind. If there was something to fight, he would fight it. But he had to get
to
it first.

“Son,” Progress said. “You look about as happy as a dead hog in the sun.”

“I’ve been better,” Slim replied. Then, another thought, another
burden struck him. “Progress,” he said. “How are you gonna do in this? You don’t even have a weapon.”

“Well, son,” Progress said, his smile shining. “I’m gettin’ too old to fight, but I ain’t gonna run away. That’s stupid, at my age, maybe. But stupidity don’t kill you, it just makes you sweat. Don’t you fret none, I gots a few tricks left in me still. Ain’t nothin’ ever went over my back that didn’t come back under my belly. I guess I musta picked up some of my ole lady’s attitude. She was always sayin’ that if a man got handed a long life, why, chances are he’ll die before it’s over. Way I look at it, today’s as good a day to die as any.”

“Papa,” Belizaire said. “You crazy man.”

Slim laughed. “Where have I heard
that
before,” he said. Abruptly, he was intensely aware of the noise of the generators and the sudden idea it gave him. He looked at the machines, seeing a large switch on each one.

“Progress,” he said. “Let’s shut off the generators, cut the power and see what happens.”

Progress’ golden smile beamed, even in the dark light. He nodded his head in agreement; then all three of them ran madly around the building, switching the monster machines off, one by one. As each grew still and silent, the chained lightning of the wall grew fractionally dimmer, weaker, slower. There was no way to shut off all the generators in the building, but after quite a few were silenced, the three met back at the wall where Stavin’ Chain had waited.

There was only a weak, flickering glow left. Vision through the wall was nearly clear. Slim saw Nadine tied to a chair, looking straight at him, smiling and winking. She was surrounded by three men in black. Slim looked closely at them and noticed a strange thing. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t quite make out their faces beyond a fuzzily detailed blur. They were just men in black, and there were only three of them. That made Slim more uneasy than if there had been a dozen. It was too few men, too easy.

He reached out to touch the wall, feeling an oily tingling as his fingers passed through. He turned to Belizaire.

“Can you shoot those men?” he asked, enraged by seeing Nadine in bondage.

“Naw,” Belizaire said, shaking his head. “I can shoot, me, only if dey shoot first. I won’t kill dem unless dey try to kill us.”

Slim nodded in reluctant agreement. It wasn’t what his emotions wanted, demanded, but he knew that it was right, had to be right. He’d never thought of rules applying to situations like this one. His teacher always taught him that if he was in fight, fight to kill because he wouldn’t get into a fight until it had gone to that extreme. But now, he realized that there had to be rules or you’d just turn into the thing you were fighting, and there would be no honor in the victory. Was that why, he wondered, the good guys so often lost in the real world?

“I guess it’s hand to hand, then,” he said.

They backed off a little, and then all three passed through the wall together, running. The passage tingled and skewed their sense of direction but, otherwise, it did them no harm and had no effect. Once through, they ran straight for Nadine and the men in black.

Slim’s study of the marital arts in his youth had taken him to proficiency. As he had gained weight and lost emotional strength, he had quit practicing but, even now, he could feel his body responding with retained knowledge and eagerness. So that when he ran up to the man he chose to fight, instead of fighting with his hands, as the man obviously expected, he lashed out with his foot, thrusting it solidly against the man’s solar plexus, pushing him back.

Slim was enough out of practice and off balance that the force of the kick nearly knocked him over. When the man came back after him, he was still fighting to retain his balance. The man in black swung at him, and there was a glint in the man’s hand. Slim stumbled backward as the knife snagged and cut the loose shirt over his belly.

Too close,
he thought, stepping back a bit more. He looked
quickly out the sides of his eyes. Belizaire and Progress were struggling with the other men in black. Nadine was squirming and fighting against the ropes that held her. Then his full attention had to return to the approaching man and the knife he held.

He knew he would likely have only one good chance against the knife. The man in black obviously knew how to use it, at least a lot better than Slim would have known. He tried to remember what his Sensei had taught him about weapons.

Study the weapon, how the opponent uses it, his motions.

Slim watched. The man swung his arm away from his body, extended it too far to be well in balance or to carry the optimum force that it could. Slim and the man in black circled one another, Slim keeping his distance, the man in black swinging the knife and blurrily smiling. He pushed his shoulder out and learned forward with each swing.

Most weapons,
his Sensei had told him,
require some distance to be effective. A knife, a club, a sword, the way they are commonly used, need distance. So, to combat these weapons, you must get inside their range and attack the arm that holds them.

That was the scary part for most people, moving right into the weapon, rather than away from it.
Take time,
Sensei had said.
Think, and when you are ready to fight, do not concentrate on the weapon. Watch your opponent’s eyes and shoulders. They will tell you where he will strike next.

Slim looked in the man’s eyes. They were dark blobs, as black as the suit, but he thought he could see movement in them. He let the man move closer to him, a step at a time. The man’s eyes flicked sideward and down and his shoulder pushed out as he swung the knife. Slim skipped easily out of distance, still studying. Then he stood in a good, solid stance. Not one of the traditional stances, which were mostly for learning, but his own stance, one which he’d found he could move smoothly and quickly from. He held his arms relaxed, slightly cocked, as the man moved closer to attack again.

Slim stood still, waiting. The black eyes twitched and he exploded into movement. His hands rose to the side of his head, then slashed downward. He hit the man’s wrist hard, then held on. He pulled the man closer to him and took advantage of his motion to ram an elbow into the man’s face. He pushed down on the man’s arm and brought his knee up hard. He heard the man’s bones break as he bent the arm over his rising knee. The knife fell to the floor.

Slim twisted on the single foot, stepped down, lowered his hands, then struck upward with his opened right hand. The fleshy base of his palm struck the point of the man’s chin. He grunted and fell to the ground, unconscious.

Slim’s heart was beating raggedly and his breath came hard. He was trembling. Not a violent man, he’d rarely been in fights. He picked up the knife and started toward Nadine, then stopped cold as he saw what was happening. Progress was lying flat on the ground. The other man in black was crouched over his body, knife raised high and ready to kill. Belizaire had finished off his own man and, even as Slim watched, the big man slammed the butt of the long rifle into the face of the man over Progress. Belizaire kicked the man in black’s unconscious body off of Progress, but Progress just lay still.

“Get me loose” Nadine yelled. She’d worked her gag off, and was now struggling mightily against her bonds. Slim rushed to cut the ropes. As soon as she was loose, she ran to Progress and started examining him. He was cut in two or three places, one deeply, if the amount of blood was any indication. And there was a quickly swelling cut and bruise on the side of his head, extending to his left eye.

“Nadine,” Slim said, touching her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll take him to the hospital.”

“No,” she replied harshly. “We
can’t
take him to the hospital.” She looked up, a pleading look in her eyes. “Belizaire?”

The gris-gris man bent down and picked Progress up as if his limp body weighed nothing. “Yes. Bon,” he said. “We take papa to my home.

My woman and me, we take good care of him. But Slim is right, yes? Let’s get out dis place. We cannot fight no more, us.”

Belizaire carried Progress to the front of the building. Slim and Nadine followed tiredly. Nadine pulled Slim’s arm around her shoulders and leaned against him as they walked.

It was nearly dark outside when they got to the pickup. Belizaire sat Progress gently in the middle of the seat. He got in and started the truck up. Slim got in the other side and, after helping Stavin’ Chain get in the back, Nadine sat on Slim’s lap. There was no pleasure in the contact, though he was happy that they had been able to get Nadine back. He was only afraid that the price might be the life of the old man he had come to love and admire.

“Papa be okay,” Belizaire said as he drove. “He’s not hurt so bad, him. I take care of him. But dis business, she’s not finish, yes? You two must take care of it without papa.”

“Yes,” Nadine said. “We’ll take care of our end. You just take care of Daddy. Slim and I’ll do the rest.”

We
will?
Slim thought, wondering how. He wondered all the way out to Progress’ to get the van, and he wondered all the way back into town until they pulled up in front of Nadine’s apartment building.

“Is this right, Nadine?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Belizaire’s the best there is. If he says Daddy’s going to be okay, he will be.” She looked at him and love almost overcame the tiredness in her eyes. “Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “I need to take a shower, bad. And it seems to me, you and I had some plans that were interrupted.”

16

A correct, complete and detailed explanation of music
—
that is, a full restatement, in terms of concepts, of what music expresses . . . would also be a sufficient restatement of the world in terms of concepts, or completely in harmony with such a restatement and explanation, and hence the true philosophy.

—Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Idea

Wake Up Mama (E)

Wake up mama, come and dust my broom
,

Say wake up pretty mama, come and dust my broom
,

Spread out baby, give your daddy some lovin’ room.

Wake up mama, get that jellyroll hot
,

Said wake up sweet mama, get your jellyroll hot
,

Your daddy wants, all the cookin’you got.

Wake up mama, white snake is at the door
,

Said wake up mama, that ole snake is at the door
,

Take all you got, and still come back for more.

I got the early mornin’, moanin’ blues again
,

Yes I got the early mornin’, moanin’blues again
,

You know I can’t do right, until I slip it in.

Wake up mama, hear that mornin’ bell
,

Say wake up mama, do you hear that mornin’ bell
,

You can trust your daddy, I will never fail.

Wake up mama, you cat scratchin’ on me
,

Said wake up mama, you cat scratchin’ on me
,

When that ole cat scratch, I just can’t let it be.

T
heir night began in outrage and grew steadily more outrageous from there. Slim felt both more youthful and older than he was as he tried to keep up with Nadine’s need for him. When she had finally exhausted herself enough to fall into a restless sleep in his arms, Slim was still awake and thinking.

She hadn’t talked about what had happened. Refused to talk would be more accurate, and Slim wondered if it was more than just having been kidnapped. He didn’t think she’d been raped. He’d had a couple of women friends who’d been raped and, almost invariably, they hadn’t been able to stand being touched by a man for a long time, sometimes a very long time. Nadine had seemed to need him more, to need the sex almost desperately. But what, he wondered, would cause that kind of reaction?

As he thought about it, there was a tug on his power, on the place in his gut he had come to think of as the center of his burgeoning power. But he couldn’t figure why thinking about it would cause the power to become active, even if only a little. He was puzzled, but he didn’t yet know enough about anything to try to figure it out.

He passed it over and began wondering if he did, or would, miss
his own world. He tried to think of all the things in his world that he thought were good: the animals; his cats; especially some of the scenery, though much of that was becoming overrun by people and destroyed by pollution; much of the music and the movies. He loved the movies a lot. He did have a certain reputation, a not inconsiderable fame and a place in history in his world, being one of the men who were said to have invented heavy metal. But he’d never been sure having a punk musician venerate his memory was exactly the kind of fame he wanted or appreciated. Still, he’d have to start over, here in Tejas. But he did have Progress to teach him, and if they managed to get out of this Gutbucket quest alive, he supposed a certain reputation would come from that. And this was a culture that had respect and opportunity as far as the blues were concerned. His damned reputation hadn’t done him any good in
his
world, it hadn’t gotten him any gigs once he was outside his area. Here, he could play the living blues, and have his reputation built on ability and talent.

And there was Nadine. There was always Nadine. She had to count as a major occurrence in this world’s balance. There was, also, the seeming lack of racial conflict. That was a thing vitally important to Slim. The race hatred in his own world had caused him to suffer in ways most people would never think of or consider, looking at him as a white man. Walking through black neighborhoods to visit friends, and having the people look at him with suspicion and hostility. Even trying to make black friends, all the while knowing he would never be totally and truly trusted or accepted because he was white. For many, that made him the enemy. Or going to see the old-timers, trying to learn the heart of the blues, and being rebuffed because he was white and how could a white boy understand the blues. Trying to play in black clubs, often the only venues in some cities where you could play or hear the blues, and having the audience boo, or laugh at the white fool onstage. Here, in Tejas, his skin color didn’t matter to anyone. It was what he did and was what counted, and that was nice.

He could find everything he loved in Tejas and, to tell the truth, he had grown dismally tired of his own world, of the United States and its repressive, restrictive laws and morality. In Tejas, there was
freedom.
It was under attack, certainly, but wasn’t that true
everywhere?
And wasn’t he right here on the front line, fighting for it? He could make a difference here.

He liked, also, the idea of living in a world that had a large and free Indian Nation. That had bothered him in his own world. He’d asked Progress about the Indian Nations. The old man had smiled and told him that, after the South had won the Civil War, the Indians had unified all the tribes and kicked ass on both armies, thrown them off the remaining Indian lands and held their territories against all comers. Slim had very nearly cheered to hear that. And when Progress told him that Tejas had made an alliance with the Indian Nations and gone on to kick ass on Mexico, he did cheer. He’d decided he would have to read a little history, but on the whole he liked the layout here.

As he thought more and more about it, tallying detail after detail, he could think of nothing in his own world, nothing he’d left behind, that he couldn’t find in Tejas. It was, as farfetched as he knew the idea was, very nearly a perfect world. There was violence, to be sure, and a kind of evil. But those things would always exist and, at least, it was a type of evil he was familiar with. All in all, Slim felt that he was finally
home,
the way he thought of home, the home he’d never had. They said home was where your heart was, but Slim thought most people didn’t truly understand that. But he did, and his heart was here, in Tejas, with Nadine.

Yet there were those who knew he was here, and knew why, and who sought to kill him or send him back to his own realm. He himself didn’t know why he was here, precisely, but there did seem to be a purpose in it, and not just to find a woman to love. How he wished he knew what his enemies seemed to know: the true nature of his crossing
and mission. It was, in part, their very determination to get rid of him that made him sure he belonged here.

But he knew that their effort had not ended. They seemed to have given up on the Glory Hand; maybe it was too hard to fashion a new one, once the old one had been destroyed. But they had abducted Nadine, without hurting her; obviously that had been a lure to bring him in to them. And they hadn’t killed him when they could have, during that abduction, so maybe they had concluded that killing him wasn’t the answer. Yet they could have captured him at the same time as they captured Nadine; why hadn’t they? Surely death or capture would have dealt effectively with him, as far as they were concerned. Now as he reflected on it, it seemed to him that the man in black he had fought had not really been trying to kill him, or even to wound him, but to back him off. That first knife slash, that had sliced open his shirt without touching his belly—maybe that
hadn’t
been his lucky break. At any other time, it would have caused him to back off, not risking another such narrow escape.

So maybe they didn’t want to hurt him, physically. Yet they obviously wanted to be rid of him. What was their strategy? What made sense? There was a missing piece to this puzzle, and he needed to find it, lest it doom him.

Then he saw a possible answer. He had been told that the Glory Hand couldn’t just be thrown at him; he had to
take
it. He had, however innocently, to ask for it, to invite it; only then did it have power over him. Power to banish him from this world. Maybe that was the case in other matters, too: they couldn’t get rid of him unless he asked to be gotten rid of, funny as that sounded. Maybe if they killed him, another fat blues player would pop into this realm from somewhere else to take his place, gaining them nothing. So they had to do it gently, by their definitions, and not break the bubble. If he got scared, or thought it was the only way to save Nadine, so he was willing to take the Glory Hand or its equivalent, and be sent back to Texas,
then
they could send him. So they were trying one thing and another, without success so far.

So far. But they would keep trying, and now he had a growing foreboding that they would get more cunning as they zeroed in on him, until they found something that worked. He had escaped so far mostly by blind luck and the help of competent new friends. But if he had lost his fight with the man in black, and if Belizaire had lost, and they had been faced with the prospect of being helpless while the men in black tortured Nadine, made her scream in agony—

Slim shuddered. He had maybe come closer to losing everything than he thought—and it wasn’t over yet, by a long shot. But what could he gain by being terrified of it? Better to put it mostly from his mind, but to be on guard. So as to be ready for whatever else they sent at him. Until he was able to do whatever it was that he was here to do.

He rolled onto his side, caressed Nadine’s soft-nippled breast, then wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him. The warmth of her skin, the smell of her freshly washed hair against his nose, her toes pressed against the tops of his feet, her breath on his neck, her breasts against his chest, the small sighing noises she made as she slept, all lulled him into a relaxation of mind and body so deep that it seemed like only seconds before he, too, slept.

When Slim woke in the morning, he found that his arms and legs had become entwined with Nadine’s, and they had slept curled tightly into a ball. They were both sweaty and slick and the skin-to-skin contact felt wonderful. Without thinking, he shifted a few inches and slipped his dick inside her. She moaned and began moving slowly with him.

There was no urgency, no hunger, no sense of caring whether a climax was reached. Only an intense feeling of closeness, intimacy, and a pleasure that remained indefinable. It was, somehow, beyond lovemaking, beyond anything Slim had ever known. They moved
softly together in a timeless rhythm, uncaring of anything but that single moment of shared existence. The orgasm that surprised and shattered them both had them gasping and shuddering and clutching at each other, suddenly wide awake and excruciatingly aware. Nadine bit into his shoulder and he thought it was the sweetest pain he’d ever felt.

“Wow,” he whispered. “Nadine, you know, I’m starting to think maybe I’ve never really made love before.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “Well, maybe I don’t. Maybe it’s because I
didn’t
for so long—but this—this was so easy, so deep. I didn’t have to do anything, just be.”

Slim moaned, “I don’t think I can move.”

“
How
old did you say you were?”

“Almost forty.”

“You don’t act like a forty-year-old.”

“I know,” he said ruefully. “The secret of my success with women.”

“Oh, come on, Slim.”

“No, I’m serious, Nadine. Listen, I worked long and hard to learn how to make love well, how to treat a woman’s body. Every woman I’ve ever been involved with has loved my abnormal sexual appetite. Oh, for a few, it’s been too much of a good thing, too often, but I try hard to find women who would appreciate and enjoy me. Sometimes, though, I think maybe that’s all I have. I mean, sure, I can make love wonderfully, I can turn women into jelly, but the rest of me’s always kind of a flop.

“Everybody would tell you what a nice guy I am, how good I can fuck, but you can’t screw all the time. And it’s the rest of it I don’t seem to have any talent for. As far as fucking, I have all the confidence in the world, but just being able to fuck don’t make up for all the rest of it, you know?”

Nadine grabbed his arm. “Listen, you idiot,” she said. “You’re doing all right with me, so far. Did you ever
talk
about any of this
with those other women you say you failed with, see if they could help you work it out?”

“No,” Slim said. “Well, a couple of times, you know. But, see, there’s stuff about life I just don’t know. Stuff I’ll
never
know, but other people take for granted. I need someone to tell me stuff sometimes. But when I’ve tried to talk about it, women just say that I’m trying to avoid responsibility, or if I cared, I’d know, or flat out call me a liar. They’ll say they don’t want to be my mother, and to get my shit together. It’s beyond their imagination to understand how a person could go through life missing such big pieces of common knowledge.”