The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) (36 page)

“Duane Allman, that’s who. He coaxed
me to sleep night after night with that guitar. I let many a tear dry while I
zeroed in on the sound he made with a bottle over his finger. You can call me
stupid or whatever, but I thought Duane’s guitar sounded like angels singing.
Who here is going to tell me otherwise?”

I paused, for drama, but figured I had
to keep going even as the cops removed the last of the protestors to the street
for processing.

“That’s what I thought. But there
ain’t a single one of you can say that a choir of angels don’t sound like
Duane’s guitar.”

People clapped. Responding to the mojo
I worked.

“So if I want to keep praying to John
Lennon and Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash and Duane Allman, I’m going to, because
those guys got me through more shit than any saint or priest ever did.”

They liked that line, and let me know
it.

“I don’t know what heaven’s like.
Maybe I ain’t ever going to see it. But I know what it felt like in the studio
when those two got together because I heard it with my own ears. So keep your
rattlesnakes and water moccasins. I got this song. And a hundred like it.”

I looked over at Pauly. He stood at
his amp with his Fender P over his shoulder, cracking his knuckles.

“I do believe in something greater.
It’s just not what you believe. That is my statement of faith.”

The polite applause continued. And I
knew I’d talked too long. But it didn’t matter. I’d said what I needed to. And
now the time had come to move on.

So I turned to Katy, and to Pauly, and
said, “Let’s give them some of what they came for.”

CHAPTER Ten

I
watched the stars, but they never moved, that night lasted days,

The
devil came down from the mountain and found me straight away

She
told me I could trust her, and made a promise with her eyes

I tried
to run, but stumbled, and she replaced my dreams with lies.

“Hey,
Hey Little Bluebird” Music and Lyrics by Preston Black

The
inscription on Duane Allman’s grave read,
“I LOVE BEING ALIVE AND
I WILL BE THE BEST MAN I POSSIBLY CAN. I WILL TAKE LOVE WHEREVER I FIND IT AND
OFFER IT TO EVERYONE WHO WILL TAKE IT… SEEK KNOWLEDGE FROM THOSE WISER… AND
TEACH THOSE WHO WISH TO LEARN FROM ME.”

Only
Jamie chose to visit the gravesite with me and Katy. And Katy only did it
because she wanted to be with me, and I was fine with that. The rest went on to
Sardis, Mississippi, to get a hotel and sleep.

I didn’t hear any music at his grave.
No Les Paul. No slide guitar. The sun shone brightly on the white marble,
nearly blinding us. In my head, I couldn’t understand that a body rested in the
ground. That beneath the marble and dirt lay what remained of Duane Allman. In
my head he was always smiling, smoking, riding his motorcycle, playing his Les
Paul. Because of all the live recordings and the pictures and the little bit of
video, he’d never have to be truly dead to me. In other words, seeing his grave
didn’t change as much as I thought it would.

I said, “Coast is clear?”

“You’re good,” Jamie said. Sometimes I
think he liked using me as an excuse to trip into deviance.

I grabbed the black metal fence and
hoisted myself to the top, then dropped onto the sacred ground between Duane
and Berry’s final resting places. When I knelt between them I felt a little
sting of guilt. “Should I feel bad about this?”

“Only if you get caught,” Katy said.
“So stop screwing around.”

“Right. What’s first?”

Jamie pulled out the little scrap of
paper Simoneaux had written the directions on. He brushed the crease out of it,
cleared his throat, then said, “Put thirteen pennies on the headstone, and say,
‘Come here, kind spirit, and sell me some of what you got. Please protect me,
Katy, Pauly, Jamie, Ben, Rachael, Chloey, Henry and Alex.”

“Now?”

“Sure,” Jamie said. “Then you walk
around the grave three times. Clockwise.”

So I put the pennies on the headstone
and said the words just as he’d read them. When I finished my laps, Jamie said,
“Now you take the dirt from near the head, go down about eight to ten inches.
Dig out your thirteen handfuls and say, ‘I’m paying you for what I’m taking,
and for your protection tonight. In the name of the Lord.’ Then you drop the
pennies in the hole and bury them.”

I took the Jack Daniels bottle from my
jacket and unscrewed the lid. I stuck my hand in between the plants and yanked
out a big hunk of grass. I dug into the topsoil with the bottle cap, scraping
the sides of the hole to loosen the red Georgia clay. Then I scooped it into
the bottle a handful at a time.

The dry clay consisted mostly of dust
that coated the inside of the bottle, and it didn’t go in as easy as I thought
it would. I broke up bigger clumps the best I could and shoved them into the
neck. When I finished, I had red clay stuck beneath my fingernails. I turned
and passed the bottle through the fence to Jamie. Before I could climb back
over, Jamie said, “Preston, would you do me the honor?”

He held his hand through the fence and
turned his palm up. I took the two guitar picks, one for Duane’s grave, one for
Berry’s, and placed them. As I turned, he nodded. “Thank you.”

The
crossroads, and Barbee Cemetery, just south of Lula, Mississippi, were right
where I’d left them. But the hundreds of cars lining the road were new. Kids
tailgated next to hatchbacks, middle-aged guys wearing Atlanta Braves caps and
Arkansas Razorback hats and New Orleans Saints jerseys sat on the hoods of
their Navigators and Land Cruisers. Guys walked up and down both sides of the
highway making moves on the girls sitting in the front seats of their Focuses
and Civics, texting. There were high school kids straight-up blazing right out
there in the open. I could smell their skunk weed as we drove past.

“Hundreds,” I said.

The flat landscape went on for miles.
Every now and then a row of trees hinted that there was more to this place than
fields to be plowed, crops to be tended to.

“Thousands,” Katy corrected me.

Pauly said, “You got to be shitting
me.”

When we got to the intersection of 49
and 61, I could see them stretched out to the north and south as well, with
their blinkers flashing and parking lights on.

“This is my life,” I said. “My
problem. What do these people need to see?”

“Who told them about all this?” Katy
asked. It came off as more of a scolding, really.

“I told Ray we were headed back to
where it all started, that’s all. I kind of assumed he’d think it was metaphorical.”

Pauly said, “You assumed that kid had
a head for metaphor?”

“Okay, everybody calm down,” Jamie
said. “No matter what happens they’re going to see what they choose to see.”

“Yeah, but if nothing happens I’m the
one that looks like an asshole. If nothing happens, all these people are going
to run home and say I’m a fraud and I’m full of shit.”

“If nothing happens, Preston, then we
have nothing to worry about.” Katy put her hand on my knee. She wore my green
Army jacket over top of her other jacket. I didn’t want to say anything, but it
was pretty much what she wore the night they abducted her.

She said, “If nothing happens, we go
home and sleep in and eat Sirianni’s and write songs—or not write if that’s
what we want. Then Easter Sunday we can eat ham and pierogi until we can’t
move. Grandma’s making halupki special for you. You can sleep until April if
you want. But let’s get this straight—if nothing happens tonight, we win.”

“Okay.” I pulled her over to me and
kissed the top of her head.

“Pull right over here?” Jamie slowed
to stop in the median.

“Looks as good as anyplace else.” I
turned to take it all in. “Surprised the cops ain’t showed up. Kind of wish
they would.”

We drifted into the soft grass between
the divided lanes of Highway 61. The rest of the gang pulled in right behind
us. Ben got out of the other car first. He couldn’t believe it either.
“Preston, you ready to embrace the suck if this all goes south?”

I ignored him as I buttoned my denim
jacket up over my hoodie. “What time is it?”

“About ten ’til twelve. What’re you
supposed to do?” I could see Katy’s breath when she talked.

“I don’t know, for sure.” Over my
shoulder somebody tooted their horn. From the other direction I heard a loud
car stereo playing techno. The whole scene pissed me off.
This
ain’t fucking Bonnaroo, people
.

Jamie popped the trunk and I grabbed
my guitar. “Danicka said be here before midnight with my guitar, a silver coin,
and the grave dust. She said I go to the middle and get started.”

Katy said, “Just like that, huh?”

“I don’t know. I have to read
something too.” I gulped down the rest of my coffee and set the cup on the
hood. “You think this is a waste of time?”

“We’ll see. What do you do with the
coin and grave dust?”

“She said they’re for protection.”

Ben said, “From her?”

“I don’t know.”

Katy stood there, expecting a little
more from me.

I shrugged. “Maybe this will all be
over tonight.”

“Maybe?” She kissed my cheek and I set
my guitar in the grass.

“Well, I don’t know what you all are
going to see.” I crossed my arms. “I think it’s going to be a discussion. Like
a negotiation.”

“Preston,” Rachael said my name like
it was a placeholder to hold the conversation until she could take a sip of hot
tea. “Don’t you have to give something up in a negotiation?”

I took a deep breath as she went on.
“What will you put on the bargaining table? Considering how much everybody has
already lost.”

Nobody said a word. Except me.

I replied, “I don’t know if you all
know how much Katy, and by extension, all of you, have done for me. Pauly
knows, because he’s known me his whole life. Jamie knows. He saw what happened
with Ernie Currence down at his farm, and he knows Mick, so he probably has
some backstory that you all don’t.”

I couldn’t exactly turn and look
Rachael in the eye, but I tried my best. I said, “Maybe you don’t remember the
first time I met you, but I sure do. We played Scrabble at your mom and dad’s
house. That night I found out about Stu’s death and Pauly’s accident within
minutes of each other. A monumental night. If there’s a bigger word for that
kind of night, I don’t know it. And the major difference between my life then
and my life now is Katy. The show at The Stink doesn’t matter if I’m on stage
by myself. And therefore, nothing matters if I’m by myself. The best thing
about the life we have, for me, isn’t about the music at all. It’s about waking
up with Katy and sharing quiet moments with Katy and going to McDonalds’
drive-thru in our pajamas on a Sunday morning. It’s about the surprise of
feeling her hand in mine when I don’t expect it. It’s about having somebody ask
you if everything’s okay when you wake up with a nightmare at four in the
morning.”

In a way I felt like I’d gotten too
far ahead of myself. But in a way, it didn’t matter. “So what am I going to put
on the table if I have to put something on the table to get things back to the
way they were? To make sure Pauly can live the life he wants?”

Everybody waited.

“I’m going to give Danicka back her
music. I’m going to tell her to shove it. I’ll work construction if I have to,
but I’ll still be able to make Katy happy. Because I believe I make her happy.
This thing we got—making music as a couple—is a rare thing. It doesn’t bother
me that interviewers always ask about being in a relationship even though there
are things we’d both rather talk about. I don’t see us as Johnny and June for a
lot of reasons, although there are a lot of similarities there, too. But it
comes down to being able to wake up with her every day.”

I knew nobody would be able to say anything
after all that. So I just left it out there to the stars. Katy slid her hand
into mine. I knew if I stopped to think about what I’d said it would really get
to me and bring me down. So I didn’t, and it took a lot of effort to keep the
things I said out of my head.

Thank God Pauly was there to put
everything right back in.

“You’d give all this up for me?” He
dumped out his coffee and lit a cigarette. “Then you are fucking stupid.”

I pulled Katy closer to me. She took a
deep breath and leaned against me. I kissed her, then said, “Do you think this
is stupid?”

“No, Preston.” She kissed me back and
I closed my eyes. She let go of my hand before backing away.

When I walked into the intersection, a
fuss washed through the people lined up along the sides of the road. The noise
went out along the highways, like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. And
when I strummed, the crowd plopped down into the grass in the median, on car
hoods and in truck beds. The alternating yellow, red, and green light barely broke
through the darkness.

For a second I thought I should say
something, maybe apologize in advance to the people who came out tonight. When
I looked at the Post-it notes stuck to the top of my guitar I figured Katy was
right—I didn’t owe anybody. Dani never said if I had to read while I played or
if it even mattered, so I strummed lightly. Over and over I told myself
you
don’t owe them
.
“I’m going to recite a little bit of the one hundred and thirty-sixth Psalm
here. So bear with me for a bit.”

I cleared my throat, and said, “Give thanks
unto the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endureth forever.”

Strumming made it feel natural to want
to give the verse cadence, like a song. I fought the urge. I didn’t want this
to be anything at all like the music I loved. “Give thanks unto the God of
gods, for his mercy endureth forever.”

Saying the line made me think that it
provided a clue to the state of the heavens. “God of gods” meant that there had
to be more than one, making me question everything else I ever learned in
catechism.

Or it meant I’m about to come
toe-to-toe with a lesser god
.

And the possibility of seeing Danicka
for what she really was scared me.

“Give thanks to the Lord of lords, for
his mercy endureth forever.”

I shook my head and tried to turn my
back, but they’d surrounded me. They were everywhere, watching. These last few
days made me realize that all I ever wanted to do was be free to write and play
my music and here I was, on display, showing the world my fears and weaknesses.
Public therapy. Katy would say I already did that in my songs. Put too much of
myself into them. And I figured no matter what happened tonight, I’d lose.