Blues Highway Blues (A Crossroads Thriller Book 1) Page 20

  “Don’t worry about it.” Daniel wiped away the concern with a sweeping gesture of his hand. He looked himself over and admitted, “It’s been a rough couple of days, but I can pay for my drinks.”

  “Well, then, you’ve come to the right place,” the bartender smiled confidently. “I specialize in treating ‘a rough couple of days.’ What can I get you?”

  What Daniel needed didn’t come in a bottle, but he had to start somewhere. His eyes drifted across the bottles lined up with military precision across the back bar, the decades of memorabilia that had gathered on the walls and the glaring neon illuminating the windows. A distant memory of his father came close to him and touched him on the shoulder. “Bottle of Pabst.”

  “Old school.” The bartender put an amber bottle down and took the twenty.

  “That’s all for you,” Daniel offered. “If you can help me answer a few questions.”

  The bartender looked down at the familiar portrait of Tennessee’s favorite son and then back up at Daniel. “Ol’ Hickory won’t buy you much more than my favorite color or the name of the girl who popped my cherry, but you can go on and ask.”

  “The name Hiram mean anything to you? Or Luke? Luke the Drifter?” Out of his filthy shirt pocket, Daniel pulled a piece of paper on which he’d written the lyrics to “Six Feet of Peace.” He smoothed it out just like he’d done to the twenty and pushed it across to the bartender. “Any of that make sense to you?”

  The barkeep picked up the paper, gave it a glance, and then handed it right back. “I told you. I’m in the business of selling drinks, not buying songs.”

  “I’m not selling anything,” Daniel assured him.

  The bartender rubbed the bald dome of his head. “And I don’t need no lawyer coming in here six months from now dropping paper on me because you claim you wrote whatever’s at the top of the charts and I’m the guy who you say must’ve passed it along to Tim or Keith or whoever.”

  “It’s not like that. It’s not even a real song. It’s just a clue.” Daniel struggled to explain. “It’s like a scavenger hunt—”

  “Oooooh!” the bartender exclaimed, pointing at Daniel’s filthy clothes as if they were the explanation to everything. “I couldn’t figure out why a guy in a suit like that looks like he’s spent a week digging crooked furrows behind a one-mule turn plow.”

  “Sure.” Daniel didn’t understand or care what that meant, he just wanted to know: “Does this makes any sense to you?” He pushed the lyrics back across the bar.

  The bartender picked them up, mumbling to himself and brushing his bushy, brown mustache as he read them over.

  “I don’t understand the first verse,” he admitted. “Could be about anything, really. I’d say the songwriter should work on narrowing the scope—”

  “It’s not a real song,” Daniel reminded him.

  “Right, right.” He turned his attention back to the paper. “And I don’t understand this last verse neither.”

  “That’s OK,” Daniel said. “I got that one. I’m Danny. So I get—”

  “You’re Danny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mmm-hum,” the bartender mumbled some more, as if that admission cleared up additional questions he’d had. “But this second verse I understand. I’m pretty sure.” And then with an outstretched index finger, he pointed past Daniel and announced. “The man you’re looking for is right there.”

  Daniel wheeled around on his stool, momentarily off guard, but ready to confront his tormentor.

  There was no one there.

  “Who?” Daniel asked, visibly disappointed and confused.

  “Him,” the bartender repeated, leaving the “Right there, ya goddamn fool!” unspoken but easily inferred from his tone.

  Looking past where he’d expected to find a flesh-and-blood culprit standing, Daniel followed the bartender’s pointing finger to a framed photograph on the bar’s Wall of Fame.

  “Kid Rock?” Daniel asked incredulously.

  “Not him. Him.” And this time the bartender pointed emphatically at one particular portrait. “Hank. Your song’s about Hank Williams.” There was more than a note of triumph in his voice.

  It was not enough to convince Daniel. “You sure?”

  “Lookee here.” The bartender’s crooked finger traced along the lines.

  Trying to pay off

  All the debts that I owed

  Hiram and Luke, they

  Went out on the road

  “The world may know him and love him as Hank Williams, but his God-given name was Hiram.”

  “Really?” Daniel chuckled out loud. “Can you imagine if country music’s greatest artist was named Hiram?”

  The barkeep failed to find the humor. His dead-eyed glare wordlessly communicated that in Nashville there are figures who are too revered to be the subjects of jokes: Jesus. A man’s mother. Whoever is coaching the Vols (as long as they’re winning). And Hank Williams.

  And on that note, the bartender returned to his lyrical analysis, not out of some notion of Southern hospitality or because he felt a moral duty to earn the twenty he’d already pocketed, but simply because he’d become engaged in the exercise.

  “Luke.” He pointed to the name on the paper. “Is Luke the Drifter.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s Hank,” the barkeeper answered like he shouldn’t have had to. “History has him painted as a drunkard and hophead and carouser, but that wasn’t Hank. At least it wasn’t all of him. Everybody thinks he was one thing, but he was something completely different.”

  “Aren’t we all?” If it came off as flippant, Daniel hadn’t meant it that way. He shook his head with a certain resignation. “They tell you not to judge a book by its cover, but that’s exactly how they sell them.”

  An awkward moment of silence passed and then the bartender gratefully returned to the lyrics. “He was a very spiritual person, but they wouldn’t let him record gospel music under his name because they thought it would take away from the Hank Williams image. So he recorded it anyway, but under the name Luke the Drifter.” He shook his head with regret.

  “And this,” the bartender traced the line with his finger.

  In a Cadillac rag-top

  With a pain that wouldn’t cease

  Drifting like cowboys

  They found

  Six feet of peace

  “The Cadillac convertible was the car Hank passed away in.” Ol’ Hank had passed long before the bartender had been born, but there was still a note of personal loss in his voice. “They’re not even sure where it happened, just somewhere in the darkness, on his way to the next show. Now, that’s a musician’s death.” His voice was a fitting mixture of solemnity and admiration.

  “This last bit,” he continued. “When Hank could keep a backup band together, he called them the Drifting Cowboys.”

  Daniel nodded appreciatively. He still didn’t, however, have a location for the next clue. “And the ‘Six Feet of Peace’?”

  The bartender shook his head, the blank look on his face a silent admission he was stumped on that one too. “The closest I can come up with is maybe his grave.”

  Daniel suddenly regretted spending the twenty on something that now seemed so obvious. “Of course, that has to be it,” he concurred, relieved to have finally cracked the riddle. “The next one has to be at his grave.”

  “The next what?”

  Daniel didn’t want to get into it. “You don’t happen to know where Hank’s buried, do you?”

  “’Course I do,” the bartender snapped, offended by the suggestion he might not know the location of Hank’s final resting place.

  Daniel slid off his stool, ready to get started. “How do I get there?”

  “You want to take Sixty-Five all the way down cross the ’Bama border,” the bartender started.

  A confused and panicked look passed over Daniel’s face. “He’s not in Nashville?”

  “No, sir. They put him in the groun
d down in Montgomery, Alabama.”

  “Montgomery?” Daniel had to hold on to the bar to keep from falling over. “Alabama?” His head spun like he’d just spent the last twenty minutes drinking malt liquor on a carnival Tilt-A-Whirl. “Montgomery?”

  It had been an understandable mistake to assume the Nashville postmark meant he was to go there himself—understandable, but still a mistake. He hoped not a fatal one.

  If he’d only stayed in Memphis and taken the time to decode the song instead of jumping to conclusions, he might have realized the lyrics’ clues were pointing him in an entirely different direction. Now he was three hundred miles north of where he needed to be. And time was running out.

  “You know, a lot of people are quick to write off ol’ Hank as just another musician who killed himself with the booze and drugs,” the bartender offered. “But it wasn’t like that at all. He had a spinal condition; the bones in his back didn’t form right. Man, the pain he musta suffered his whole life—” He stopped and looked back down at the lyric sheet. “I guess that’s the ‘pain that wouldn’t cease’ part right there.”

  Daniel was in an agony of his own and couldn’t muster more than a weak nod of acknowledgment for the little bit of medical trivia.

  “They say back before this place was Tootsie’s, Hank used to step out between shows at the Grand Ol’ Opry. He’d duck out the back door of the Ryman and cut across the alley out there, come right in the back door for a couple drinks here. Most people write it off as he just had the thirst, but the poor sonofabitch was just trying to get a little relief from the goddamn pain.” He shook his head. “Why you think people always gotta make other folks look their worst?”

  Daniel wondered that himself. “Human nature, I guess.”

  The bartender shook his head. “It ain’t right. Ol’ Hank was just a man in pain looking for a little relief, you know? Just looking for a little—”

  “Peace?” Daniel wondered aloud.

  “I suppose.”

  “That alley you said Hank used to cross to get here.” Daniel tried to contain his excitement. “How wide is it?”

  “I don’t know.” The bartender’s face screwed with confusion. “Twenty feet. Maybe a little less.”

  “Or if you were taking a little artistic license,” Daniel hedged, “about six feet?”

  “I think it’s wider than that—”

  “Maybe.” Daniel didn’t feel constrained by strict linear measurements. “But if you were writing a song, you might compare the distance he had to travel to the depth of a grave.” He pointed to the first verse.

  Well, they break my heart

  You steal my soul

  They take what they can,

  You’ve taken control

  They want what I got

  You won’t give me release

  But in between

  The two of you

  I’ve found six feet of peace

  “Don’t you get it?” Daniel’s voice lifted. “It’s about Hank being torn between his audiences over at the Ryman and his problem with the bottle right here.” He pointed at the stool next to him. “And the six feet of peace—”

  “I don’t get it,” the bartender confessed.

  “It’s the alleyway. When he steps away from the Grand Ol’ Opry or pulls himself away from the bar. The only place he finds any peace is the place in between the two.”

  The bartender brightened a little. “I get what you’re gettin’ at. You think—”

  Daniel did. “Where is it?”

  “What?”

  “The back door.” Daniel shot to his feet, reenergized by his revelation.

  “It’s right there,” the bartender pointed to the magical portal. “But you can’t—”

  “Sure I can,” Daniel told him confidently. “And I’m not even going to offer you another twenty, because I know you want to see what’s out there even more than I do.”

  “Do not,” the bartender told him plainly, crossing his arms across his broad chest to demonstrate his resolve.

  Daniel just smiled. And waited.

  The bartender stood his ground.

  Until he couldn’t stand it any longer. “Oh, goddamn it, come on,” he grumbled as he made his way around the bar and led Daniel back to country music’s most famous door.

  The problem with legends—whether they’re people, places, or things—is that they’re almost always disappointing when encountered in real life.

  Despite its place in country-western mythology as a sort of Valhalla’s Gate, Tootsie’s back door was just a door—and not much of one at that. It was old and creaky and when the bartender opened it, it didn’t lead anywhere except out to a narrow alleyway that ran between Tootsie’s back wall and the west side of the Ryman Auditorium.

  Of course, every once in a while there’s a chance encounter with the stuff of legends—and the result is pure magic.

  Daniel stepped out into the completely unremarkable alley. The bartender followed. Though neither man would ever have admitted it aloud—at least not sober—both felt Hank’s presence between them. Without a word exchanged, they both closed their eyes and instantly felt the unrelenting agony of Hank’s twisted spine as if it was their own. Each man took a labored breath as he pondered the staggering career pressures that must have overwhelmed a country boy from Mount Olive, Alabama, who’d only ever wanted to play guitar and sing.

  Silently, they each imagined what the night air must have felt like to a man who found himself trapped between the suffocating crowds that filled the Ryman every Saturday and the smoke-choked barroom where he could feel himself slipping away one drink at a time. Moving between the two must have felt like freedom. That small, precious space must have been six feet of peace.

  When he finally opened his eyes, Daniel found he was looking at the back wall of Tootsie’s. Almost the entire surface was covered with fliers announcing all sorts of concerts and shows and CD-release parties. They were all sizes and colors, but the one that caught his eye most was a bright green one that read:

  DOCKERY PLANTATION

  TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN TOUR

  A Million Reasons to Follow This Band

  Daniel approached the poster cautiously, certain it was his clue, but afraid of what he might find. He peeled it from the brick wall and discovered a CD affixed to its underside.

  “This,” Daniel announced victoriously, “is what we were after.”

  Still drifting through the mists of time with Hank, the barkeep grumbled at the intrusion. “What?”

  “This,” Daniel repeated, holding the CD. “This is what I was supposed to find.”

  It’s hard to be disappointed without having had expectations, but the bartender was dissatisfied just the same. “That? What the hell is that?”

  Daniel smiled slyly. “Let’s go inside and find out.”

  “It’s going to cost you.”

  “No, it’s not.” Daniel’s smile widened.

  The bartender was adamant this time. It was a matter of principle. “If you want to hear that…” He considered his price. “Fifty.”

  “Not a cent.”

  The bartender growled. “All right, twenty.”

  Daniel didn’t make any response except that same goddamn smile.

  The bartender kept telling himself it didn’t matter what was on the CD. It was nothing to him one way or another. Not really. And yet no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, he couldn’t deny that he really wanted to know whatever secret was on the mysterious CD. “All right,” he conceded at last. “But you’re buying me a goddamn drink.”

  Daniel’s shit-eating grin broadened even wider. “You can have my Pabst.”

  There were any number of things the bartender wanted to say, but what he settled on was, “Come on.”

  Back inside Tootsie’s barroom, last year’s Miss Jackson County had finished her set and the place had settled into silence. A rarity for the place.

  “Give it here.” The bartende
r took the disc from Daniel and slipped it into the stereo system behind the bar.

  A second later, all the speakers in the joint popped. An electric guitar—six strings of raw, unfiltered nastiness—kicked open the door and a heavy, rolling bass with a siren-wailing harmonica rushed into the room right behind it. The drummer beat his kit like he was mugging it. The tune was classic blues at its heart, but electrified and amplified to give it a bolder, more defiant edge that no mortal hands could have ever wrung from an acoustic guitar.

  Immediately, Daniel knew where he was headed next.

  “Aw yeaaah,” the vocalist screamed and the whole musical concoction started to brew just a little bit hotter.

  “We’re calling you out!” the lead singer screamed again before the whole band launched into a full-frontal assault.

  You got your fancy mansion, maybe three or four

  Got a limo and a jet and a bleach blonde Hollywood whore

  You got stock and bonds and treasuries

  And all that kind of shit

  From where I stand

  You and your band

  Don’t deserve none of it

  ’Cause what you do

  Has all been done before and put to bed

  And you wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance

  Cuttin’ heads

  With the living dead

  “Who is this?” the bartender asked above a raucous blues free-for-all between a mic’ed-up harmonica and two electric guitars.

  Daniel just shook his head. “I wish I knew.”

  Now Charlie Patton played tuned down

  But he made that guitar scream

  He could play on just five strings

  What Page can’t on eighteen

  Cutting heads

  With the living dead

  And Elmore James, he was tweaking his amps

  When the Edge was still in shortie pants

  Jimmie Rodgers rocked the house

  John Lee Hooker was the man

  And there ain’t no one can play today

  Like that Magic Sam

  Cuttin’ heads

  With the living dead

  Freddy King, everybody knows,

  Didn’t need no Lego videos

  So run along in your suit of red