The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) (4 page)

Katy raised the bow to her strings and
I told her to hold, then gestured for the crowd to take the chorus. They belted
out the lines just like they did for a Vols game, and ended with a burst of rapturous
applause.

Katy took over with a wail from her
fiddle that they could’ve heard all the way back into Kentucky. Maybe even all
the way back to West Virginia. She wiggled her head as her little fingers
arpeggiated along her fingerboard, working that black Mod mini dress she picked
up at that vintage shop on Carson Street back in Pittsburgh. The silver
bracelets dangling below her rolled-up sleeves reflected the light like a
million little stars. Her purple nails danced across the fingerboard like butterflies
hopping from flower to flower. She hacked at the strings with her little bow in
long, swooping arcs.

I turned the guitar’s volume down and
flipped the switch to the neck pickup. Tearing through the rhythm like I
singlehandedly bore responsibility for every heartbeat in the room. Like, the
instant I stopped, every one of us would keel over and die. “One more time,” I
said.

Katy built her music brick-by-brick as
I maintained that steady driving rhythm. One brick for the assholes after the
show last night, and another for the same assholes standing out in front of the
club today. One brick for the unkind words they said, another for their signs.
A brick for their beliefs and their lies. A brick for all the fans who turned
around and went home after seeing their sidewalk sideshow.

And in one giant swoop my little Katy
kicked the wall right over. The crowd ate it up, swaying and dancing with their
eyes closed and fists in the air.

I leaned right into the mic and sang
my own version of “Whipping Post” as Katy mirrored my rhythm with the throaty
drone of her fiddle. Some of the older fans sang the original lyrics. The one
who didn’t know the song watched and danced. For the last line in the verse I
thought about the protestors out front and sang, “And there’s the devil, right
in there with them, she’s just wearing a new disguise.”

Katy smiled. This was fucking fun. I
pulled my glass Coricidin bottle out of my back pocket and slid it over my ring
finger, coaxing my Tele to squeal and scream an accent to Katy’s rhythm
throughout the next few lines. I couldn’t play slide to save my life and
supported the melody instead of trying to sound anything at all like what Duane
Allman played. My noise sounded more like the slide on Lennon’s “Number 9
Dream”—little droning glissandos to maintain the illusion of structure. I
smiled and bobbed as I sang the rest of the verse, building a head of steam
with each note I played. Jacking up the volume and intensity.

At the chorus, I stood on my toes and
screamed the line, but didn’t finish with my throat. I jammed my Tele’s volume
all the way back up and broke out a high note that came from way past my frets,
almost past the neck pickup. The crowd kept singing so I ripped into the
pentatonics thinking about Duane’s last ride through those shady, winding
Georgia hills. Past live oaks dripping with Spanish moss with warm wind in his
hair like he knew he’d never see a tomorrow. I let the notes pile up in the
amp, held them there for a second like holding a hit from a joint before releasing
them into the room in giant bursts that shook dust from the rafters.

When I opened my eyes to take the next
verse I looked for the smiles and nods of approval from the audience.
Especially from the older guys, the ones who’d been to enough shows to know we
were earning our cash money tonight. The ones who’d seen The Stones or Clapton
in the seventies or Van Halen in the eighties. I wanted to make eye contact and
let them know that I appreciated their approval. That I needed to make them
happy, not the kids. But they weren’t looking at me. None of them. Instead they
all watched something in the back of the room.

In my earpiece Pauly kept saying, “We
got trouble. We got trouble.”

The bright lights of the lobby poured
over the heads of the people in the last few rows. The house lights came up,
and Katy stopped playing. As much as I didn’t want to, I stopped too. Pauly got
off his chair and ran down the aisle to the edge of the stage. I yanked my IEM
out of my ear, reached out a hand, and pulled him onto the stage with us.

Pauly reacted to the sight of the four
Circuit Riders pushing through the audience by grabbing the wooden stool I’d
set my water bottles and capo on. He leveled that stool out in front of him
like some kind of blue-collar lion tamer. It took another minute for my eyes to
adjust to the light, but as soon as I saw all that black leather and ink
pressing toward us I pulled the cord from my Tele and set it into its stand.
Then I pushed Katy behind me and grabbed my mic stand. When the first Circuit
Rider got to the stage I could see the words on his face and shaved head. As
soon as he put his hand on the laminated wood floor I stomped his fingers with
the heel of my boot.

He pulled his hand away like he’d
touched a hot stove. He didn’t make a sound as he shook his fingers out. Pauly
swung the stool at him.

In the time it took to blink, Zebadiah
Boggs jumped onto the stage and charged right at me. I lifted the mic stand and
jabbed it at him, catching him right in the face with its weighted base. Blood
spurted from his nose and he reeled into the crowd, knocking some fans onto
their asses. The rest spread, giving him a wide berth.

Boggs struggled to his feet, shouting,
“I want them both!”

His companion lunged for the stage
again, but Pauly kept him back with the wooden stool. His face grew red and he
kept shouting, “You fucking pussy. You ain’t nothing.”

A low whine of feedback built in my
amp, and when I backed over to it to shut it off I pulled Katy right along with
me. In the aisle a pair of cops squared off against one of the intruders. Being
outnumbered at least two-to-one didn’t stop the biker from reaching for his
retractable baton. He was short and built like a fifty-gallon barrel. Had to be
A.G. Ashby, Boggs’s right-hand man. Both cops drew their weapons.

The fourth biker came from the cover
of the crowd and got one of the cops in a headlock. Seeing the change in
momentum, Boggs broke for the stage again. More police officers came in from
the lobby, but I knew they wouldn’t get down here in time to do anything. I
pulled Katy toward the green room.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw
Pauly get Boggs’s crony in the neck and shoulder with his wooden stool. Pauly
smiled and whooped as the guy hit the hardwood floor. “Stay down, you son of a
bitch.”

The man didn’t even twitch. I swear to
God I thought Pauly killed him.

Boggs watched his guy go down and
switched direction. He bore down on Pauly like the poor kid had slept with his
mama or something. Blood dripped down Boggs’s face and onto his chest. Both of
his eyes had purpled a bit from where I’d hit him. I said, “Katy, stay right
here,” and went back onto the stage.

Pauly hit Boggs once in the jaw with
the stool and retreated a few steps, and Boggs moved forward totally unfazed.
Boggs took a swing and Pauly ducked, then ran at him with his head down,
pushing Boggs right to me. I grabbed Katy’s mic stand and pulled it tight
around Boggs’s neck.

He fell backward, landing on me,
knocking the wind out of me. Pauly kicked him a few times. Boggs was wiry, the
muscles in his arms felt like steel cables. He twisted and bucked but I knew if
I let go of the mic stand, or even thought of it, I’d wake up in a hospital.

Katy yelled my name and I looked for
her to try to tell her I felt fine, but couldn’t angle my head back far enough.
By then a few guys from the audience had joined us on stage and were doing
their best to help Pauly and me out. They pulled Boggs off me and held him to
the ground.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I got to
my knees and tried to get my head straight. Pauly helped me to my feet. But my
hands shook and my knees wobbled, so I stood there for a second, using the mic
stand for support. As soon as I got my breath I lifted it, held it right over
the shiny part of Boggs’s skull. Right over Romans 1:18, “
They
are full of every type of evil, greed and wickedness, full of jealousy, murder,
discord, deceit and malice…
”

I could barely keep my grip. The rage
made me see spots. “Who are you to disrupt our little gig, man? We didn’t do a
thing to you.”

“Sir,” a voice behind me said. “Please
put the weapon down.”

I didn’t respond, because I didn’t
consider the mic stand to be a weapon. A police officer stepped in front of me
and twisted it right out of my hands. “Please step away.”

Pauly put his arm around me and led me
away from Boggs. I turned to find Katy and held her. She shook her head. I gave
her a little kiss. The fans that had jumped onstage to help me and Pauly
lingered around us protectively.

I whispered, “This is going to blow up
all over YouTube and Twitter.”

More cops came through the front of
the house and from the fire exits. They swept through the room, down the
aisles, full of purpose. Beams from their flashlights went row-by-row looking
for stragglers, but from what I had seen, Boggs’s guys weren’t the type to
hide. Having said that, it startled me just a bit when a pair of police
officers came in through the stage door from the alley behind the club.

One of them said, “Who does the rental
van belong to?”

Me and Katy and Pauly all raised our hands.

“Well, one of you is going to have to
step outside with me.”

It
took a while to get everything sorted out. Most of the remaining audience
lurked near the stage while the police took statements. Some sat in the first
few rows, yawning, sleeping until they had to talk to the authorities. In the
process Katy and me learned how stalking was a Class A Misdemeanor in
Tennessee, unless the act occurred within seven years of a prior conviction, in
which case it was a Class E Felony. The officer said that it might even turn
out to be aggravated stalking, and warned us that anybody charged with stalking
or aggravated stalking would be eligible to post bail and be released until the
trial.

None of that made Katy very happy,
even though the officer countered by saying any threat against an occupied
building could ultimately be considered terrorism, but she didn’t hear anything
after he’d said ‘released until the trial.’

While all this went down, Pauly tried
to get a representative from the rental agency to come out and help deal with
the damage to the van and trailer. During the ruckus somebody slashed the tires
and smashed the windows and the agency wanted to wait until morning to sort it
out. Pauly argued tenaciously and finally arranged for a rental car so me and
Katy could head down to Alabama while he sorted out the stuff with the van
before joining us in a day or two. A few fans helped us load as much as we
could into the rental. Amps, instrument cases, and mic stands so we could
record, suitcases, and some of the merch. I appreciated everything Pauly had
done to help so far and didn’t want to stick him with having to load everything
back into the trailer by himself.

The transition left us with a quiet
moment. I pulled Katy into a dark hallway backstage. The night had taken its
toll on her. When I held her she slumped into me, like she could barely muster
the energy to remain standing.

“Hey,” I said, pulling her head to my
shoulder, where I soaked in the scent of her Chanel Mademoiselle. “You’re a
star, right? I’m not talking about what you do on stage. I’m talking about what
you do for me. You are the Sun. You give me the energy I need to live.”

“When does a star rest?” I couldn’t
see her face in the dark. I could only feel her warm breath on my cheek. “It
doesn’t, Pres. It either fades out or explodes. There’s no in-between.”

“Well, if this isn’t fun for you we’ll
make it fun. Or give it up.”

“Do I get to choose?”

“We get to try.” I pulled her back
toward the dimly lit stage.

The police had left. The thirty or
forty people still hanging around drifted toward the lobby or rested across
rows of seats. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, I called them back
down and told them to get comfortable, figuring we could thank them with a song
or two. Most plopped down along the edge of the stage with their feet dangling
down, so Katy and I placed ourselves on a pair of stools and faced the stage.

We kicked-off with a cover we hadn’t
touched since last spring—“(Nice Dream).” Hearing Katy singing Radiohead reminded
me of being in Morgantown with her, and how those days ended up being some of
the most important in my whole life. We followed up with “(What’s So Funny
’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” and “In My Life.”

We joked with the audience and told a
few stories. I had Pauly tell them about how Stu hazed Delt pledges despite the
fact he wasn’t even a student, let alone a frat brother. I talked a little bit
about my trip down to the Currence’s farm with Jamie and then going down to
Elkins with Katy and Jamie later that summer and they wanted to know all about
Jamie. Katy gave me a little look like I’d opened up too much so I said Jamie
was a real good friend and left it at that.