Petrogypsies (23 page)

The camp went deathly quiet.

“You mean you ain’t gonna wash the dishes?” the Wildman finally choked, in a high, outraged voice.

The crowd started to mutter ugly mutters. I got ready for a fight, which might be better than washing all the dishes they’d lined out for us.

“Not personally, we ain’t.” Doc let the muttering get louder for a minute, waited for the crowd to begin to edge toward us. Then he smiled. “But that don’t mean they won’t get cleaned.” He turned to Sprocket and the crew. “Let’s get it on, boys.”

While the entire camp watched suspiciously, we followed Doc’s directions and ran a couple of lines from the industrial-size faucets among the troughs. We half-filled one of Sprocket’s bladders with nearly boiling water, then poured in a half-dozen sacks of 20-40 sand for scouring, then a barrel of well-cleaner, which ain’t nothing but highly concentrated soap. Then, while Sprocket held the bladder’s outside orifice wide open, we dumped into him all the pots and pans and dishes and spoons and forks and cups and bowls. All the dinnerware was metal, mostly aluminum and tin, since glass and dainty china don’t travel all that well into the places our kind of folks end up going to.

Frankly, it looked to me like some of the pieces had been saved up for a couple of days, or maybe even weeks. I overheard a couple of comments in the crowd that didn’t persuade me otherwise. All of the pieces had identifying marks scratched some place on them, so there wasn’t any chance of them getting mixed up.

We played a little casual free-form jazz in C Dorian mode while Sprocket foamed up the water in the bladder, then turbulated it by marching in place and pressure-squirting water from bladder to bladder. You couldn’t hardly hear the clanging collisions of all the stuff in his bladders over the music, which was maybe the idea.

After a half hour, Doc called a stop to the playing. I hooked up the orifice to a hose that led off to a big disposal pit on the edge of the camp. Sprocket emptied the dirty, soapy, sandy water through it, then switched back to another hose with clean water and rinsed the dishes.

He stuck his tongue out and sputtered wetly at the crowd, then winced. Maybe not so good an idea until his drillhead grew back. He started to hum, quietly at first, then louder and louder. Four of his orifices gaped open and began to whistle as they sucked air in. He swole up like he had just before he blew out on my daddy’s farm.

A geyser of steam jetted from the top of his head through his blowout relief sphincter.

Doc leaned over and whispered to me, “Razer and me figured this out last time these turkeys laid a month’s worth of dirty dishes on the crew. We swore we wouldn’t get suckered again.”

After about five minutes, the geyser trailed away into nothing. A minute later the whistling died, and the four intake orifices clenched shut. The orifice that led to the dishwashing bladder gaped open.

“High-pressure pneumatic drying,” Doc said. He stepped forward, and gestured for the rest of the crew to follow him.

“Okay, folks, let’s stack ’em. Neat, like the Wildman asked.”

* * *

We stacked the last of the dishes around eight o’clock.

Doc yelled down Sprocket’s hall while I was fumbling with my cuff-links. “Anybody got any preferences where we start out tonight?” A chorus of contradictory suggestions came from all of the rooms.

“How’s about we make it to Jon-Tim’s Juke Joint?” Doc asked. “Hillary says they got a band in tonight that plays them dirty ol’ low-down blues that Henry Lee likes so much.”

Everybody booed and howled.

“No, no! We hate that garbage!”

“Uh-uh! Anything but the blues!”

“I’d rather listen to cats fightin’ under the front porch!”

“Country and Western forever!”

“Bob Wills is still the king!”

“Well, it’s settled, then,” Doc said. “We’ll go to Jon-Tim’s and take in some blues.”

* * *

Jon-Tim’s Juke Joint had been designed with oilfield critters in mind. The place was actually a huge wooden-paneled rectangular pit a couple of hundred feet on a side and eighteen feet deep in the ground. An asphalt parking lot surrounded it. A pavilion roof, festooned on top and bottom with various-colored lights, protected it from the weather. The pavilion roof was a good fifteen feet above the ground.

Half a dozen stairways led from the surface down to the sawdust-covered floor of the pit, which was arranged like the standard inside of a good road joint, with a bar running the length of one wall, the bandstand against the opposite wall, a cleared dance area in front of the bandstand, and a bunch of tables and chairs densely packing the rest of the available space.

Critters crowded most of the way around the edge of the joint, their faces poked over part-ways into the pit, but Sprocket and Lady Jane found a couple of parking slots next to each other and glided into them. Munchkin had stayed in camp to watch over her young’uns, and Big Red and his crew had gone off to raise hell and shoot pool at a place called Fajita Rita’s where we were supposed to meet them later. After the crew climbed out through Sprocket’s mouth he nosed up until a yard of his front end dropped over the edge of the pit. Lady Jane did the same as soon as she was emptied. I’d felt guilty before on occasion about leaving them outside while we went in and partied, but Jon-Tim’s had solved that problem. They built so that the critters could attend the party, too.

As we was settling into a couple of tables, the band came on and began to fiddle with their instruments. A high-cheeked black man who had a red electric guitar strapped to him leaned into the microphone. He was dressed all in black leather. Had a big nose, a small mustache, and eyes that seemed to glow from inside with a smoky light.

“Well, folks, the band’s passing through Aggietown on our way to someplace else again. Figured we’d stop off and play y’all some Chicago blues this week. Always real happy to make a showing for Jon-Tim and Cathy. We gonna start this set off with
So Glad I’m Living
.”

He hit a chord, the rest of the band kicked in with a long piano, guitar, and screaming harmonica introduction, and they proceeded with the howlingest blues I ever heard.

He sang with a voice like whiskey that had rattlesnake heads soaking in it:

My baby’s long and tall …

Shaped like a cannon ball …

And every time she love me …

Oh, you can hear me squall …

I cry Ummmm …

I believe I change my mind.

She said – I’m so glad I’m living.

I cry, ummmm, baby – I’m so glad you’re mine.

About halfway through the song, he stepped back and surveyed the crowded room while the piano player burned down the place.

His froggy, glowing eyes widened, and he smiled in our direction. I looked over and saw Doc smiling back at him and nodding while he rocked in his chair and tapped time with his foot.

When the song finished, we clapped for a goodly while. They were damn good musicians, every one of them. The song almost sounded like something I had heard in the chief’s collection, but I couldn’t quite place it. The blues was maybe the only good thing I had brought away from the chief.

“Well, well, well, yessir,” the fella with the guitar said. “I just seen one of my bad ol’ friends slouchin’ in the dark there, trying to hide in the crowd. He plays the piano all right for oilfield trash. Come on up here, Doc. You ain’t gonna get off tonight without workin’ some. People, give the man a hand—Doc Miller!”

I looked at Doc in amazement. He showed me his teeth and stood up. His hand rested on my shoulder.

He nodded to the crowd, which was clapping and whistling.

When they quieted down, he shouted up to the band leader, “Hey, Muddy, I got a boy here wants to learn the blues. Think you and Willie can teach him some?”

Muddy laughed. “Hell, Doc, if we can teach you the blues, we can teach ’em to anybody. Get him on up here.”

“Come on, Henry Lee.” He started to pull me out of my seat.

“What? Me? Are you out of your mind?”

“You been runnin’ off at the mouth about how much you love the blues. You ain’t never gonna find anybody better to play with than Muddy and Willie.” He nodded at the squat man who was holding onto an upright bass. Willie grinned back. I got the feeling he was lookin’ forward to the execution.

“Come on, Henry Lee. Time to fish or cut bait, son.” The fellas at the table started shouting, “Henry Lee! Henry Lee!” and pretty soon the rest of the club took it up. I looked at Star; she just rolled her eyes and laughed at me. There wasn’t no graceful way out of it.

Once I got to the bandstand, Muddy handed me his back-up ax. It was identical to the one he was using, except for the gleaming black paint job. While I was strapping it on and hooking into the sound system and digging my best tortoise-shell pick out of my pocket, I watched Doc replace Otis, the fella at the piano, and run his fingers over the keys. I turned down the volume on the guitar and joined him in a couple of scale exercises for a minute. If looks could have killed, his hands would have got very sick. Instead, he just grinned and casually rolled a couple of rapid bass and treble walking riffs past me.

It helped that the guitar’s fretboard was the fastest one I’d ever touched. It practically begged me to play thirty-secondth and sixty-fourth notes on it. I examined the guitar more closely. It was light, but solid, and felt alive in my hands. On the headstock was the word
Fender
in script and in smaller block letters underneath,
Stratocaster
. I’d played through a Fender Twin Reverb amp a couple times in a camp near Manvel, but the guitar was news to me. I already wanted one. It made my Epiphone feel like a boat oar with strings on it.

“You boys warmed up?” Muddy asked, after much too short a time.

“I am,” Doc said. “You think you can handle the pressure, Henry Lee?”

“I’ll fix your wagon for this one day, Doc. Fix it good!”

“We got a song that Willie wrote for me,” Muddy said. “I believe you know it, Doc. It ain’t too hard. We play it in ‘G’ this month. Called
I’m Your Hootchie Cootchie Man
.” The crowd started to whooping and clapping again. I realized exactly who Muddy and Willie were, and I got even more petrified than I already had been.

“You ever heard the song, Henry Lee?” Muddy asked.

“Yes, sir, I sure have!” Muddy and Willie and Doc all grinned evil-like at me.

I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of watching me fall apart. I’d never played the song with anybody, since I couldn’t find anybody on the crew, lying bastards that they all were, that would admit to knowing about the blues, but I’d heard it on the chief’s phonograph enough to fake it. I hoped.

I looked up to the rim of the club and saw Sprocket. He winked at me.

That night I played the best I had ever played in my life. It was sheer desperation. I started out just trying to keep in tempo with the band, doing the simple five-note response that was required when Muddy finished his call, at the end of each measure. They took it easy on me for awhile, I think. And the basic song itself ain’t all that technically difficult.

Then they took off. Not that it got faster. Merely a whole lot
nastier
. Them fellas knew how to do it. And some of it vibrated its way into me somehow. I started bending and sliding my notes meaner, sneaking in a triplet run here and there, slurring my lead line against the dirty shuffle beat that Doc and Willie and the drummer laid down, moving up to work the high part of the neck around the fifteenth fret, making that Fender music machine scream and sing, slash and sting.

Long about the fifth verse, Doc started howling like a deranged wolf while he pounded out on the ivories a long involved riff that I somehow managed to echo a fourth higher on my ax. Muddy whipped out a harmonica and jumped aboard. We got going, the three of us, challenging each other, twining and swirling blue, blue notes around and into the smoky air while the rest of the band laid down the groove we careened through.

I got high enough to see the tops of the clouds in the sky above Aggie Station.

* * *

Forever later, when the last ringing note of the last song of the set died away, we stood for a minute and let the clapping and whistling wash over us. Muddy came over and hugged Doc and shook my hand. “Whoo, man, you two ain’t bad for a couple of white boys,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

I gave him back his ax and floated down the steps of the stage. I waved to the folks at our table and without breaking stride, headed straight to the stairway next to Sprocket. Suddenly, I felt like I was gonna explode, probably because that had been a couple of real bowel-clenched minutes up there until I had got into the groove. Not to mention the three pitchers of beer that a waitress had handed up during the set.

The restrooms were located on the surface in a small concrete building set a few yards behind and to the left of Sprocket’s rear end. I made room for another pitcher while I read the wall literature. You can always tell whether a joint is any good by the quality of the writing. Jon-Tim’s was a great joint.

When I came back out, about halfway back to my table, I almost stumbled over a leg that shot out in the aisle in front of me. A smiling Stevie Goolsby, seated alone at a table against the wall, was attached to the other end of the leg.