So I did. I put my head down and bull-rushed the little ghost, planning to smear him across the studio wall like a junebug on my truck windshield. But shit never seems to work out like I want it to, especially not in Alabama. Like most everything else bad about the state, I blame Nick Saban.
I got within a couple feet of the ghost, and all of a sudden he went from Terrible Music Fan #3 in this horror movie to Jet friggin’ Li. He jumped straight up, full-on Matrix shit, pressed his hands to the ceiling, and flipped over backwards three times in midair, landing like a cat, only more graceful, on his feet behind me.
Of course, I had to peel my face out of the acoustical foam to see that he was still on his feet because I couldn’t check my charge near in time and smacked face-first into the wall of the studio. I pushed off the wall, leaving a giant Bubba-shaped impression in the egg crate foam on the wall, and turned back to the little shithead.
“Okay, fine, we’ll do this the slow, painful way. As opposed to the fast, painful way I had planned,” I said as I stomped toward the ghost. Did I mention Jet Li? Yeah, those comparisons didn’t end with him jumping all the way over my head. This time he didn’t try to run, just stood there watching me approach, and when I got close, commenced to whooping my ass in a ridiculously efficient fashion.
I didn’t even manage to get a punch off before I caught three quick kicks. One to each knee, then a spinning reverse thrust kick right in the gut. I dropped down, and the little bastard nailed me with three more quick side kicks to the face, followed by a jumping roundhouse kick to the temple that spun me all the way around and dropped me to my knees. I put my hands up to my head, and he rained kicks on my ribs. I dropped my elbows to protect my sides, and half a dozen quick punches landed on the back of my skull in about four seconds.
As far as ghosts went, this son of a bitch was solid. I had nothing. I couldn’t even get to my feet without getting kicked in the head three or four times. Good for me my head is hard as Georgia granite, so after I got used to the sting, I could still mostly function. I shook off a couple of good shots to the face, then I just went all Frankenstein on his ass. I reached out and grabbed the front of that hoodie, hefted the little dude up over my head, and flung him across the studio, intending to bounce him off some acoustical foam this time.
Except ghosts are assholes. Magical assholes, too. Instead of taking his lumps like a human, or any other monster, really, this dick decided to just pass right through the wall without hurting himself at all. Apparently, ghosts get to decide when they want to be solid, like when they want to kick somebody in the head, and when they want to be all intangible, like when that somebody tries to throw them into a wall. Like I said, assholes.
So he flew right through the wall, which was kinda what I intended, only without the busted paneling and plaster dust that I had planned on. Then he floated back into the studio and flew over to stand right in front of me, hands on his hips like some kind of tiny Power Ranger.
“Want some more, asshole?”
“I’m the asshole?” the ghost asked, and the Auto-Tune was missing from its voice this time. “You try to solve every damn problem in the world with your fists or your guns, and I’m the asshole? Jesus wept, Bubba, when are you going to realize that not everything can be dealt with by beating the crap out of it or shooting it?”
“I know that!” I protested. “Some things you gotta set on fire.” The ghost didn’t look amused. Well, really, it didn’t look anything, on account of that faceless mask, but I could tell by his posture that my joke was not going to be considered funny by any stretch.
“You might be the most colossally dense human being I have ever encountered, and I have been around for a very long time.”
“Well, if you’re gonna do something, might as well go all the way,” I countered. “I mean, if you’re gonna be stupid, go whole hog. Go full on Dan Quayle or Kanye stupid. No point in just being third-string stupid.”
“Oh, don’t worry. You are the Super Bowl MVP of stupid. Did you really think you could beat up a ghost? I’m a ghost. With all the crap that means. I walk through walls, pop out of dark places yelling ‘boo!’ and I cannot, ever, get my ass kicked. Dipshit.” He muttered that last bit, but I still heard it.
“Now are we done? With the fighting, I mean. I’ve still got some shit to show you.”
“Yeah, I reckon. I’m sorry, I just needed to blow off some steam.”
“It’s alright. Like I said, it ain’t like you could hurt me unless I let you,” he said, then reached up behind his head and dropped his hood. Long, golden yellow hair cascaded out around his shoulders, and I thought, Great, I just got my ass beat by one of the Hanson brothers.
Then he took off the mask, and I had to quickly reconsider my pronouns. This wasn’t a little dude standing in front of me, having just beat my ass from pillar to post. This was a girl, about thirty years old, with brilliant blue eyes, a pixie smile, and long blonde hair.
“Hey,” I said, realization hitting me. “I know you. You’re that girl…”
“Kinda,” the ghost said, walking over to a chair and folding both legs under her as she sat down. I never understood how girls do that, sit cross-legged almost anywhere. If I tried that, I’d break my fool neck. I just sat in the chair opposite her like a normal person. I gestured for her to go on, and she spoke again.
“I’m using her form because it’s one you’re used to seeing. She’s not dead; I’m just the essence of the music in her. And even that’s not dead, but it will be if you don’t pay attention to what I’m showing you tonight and figure out what to do about it soon.”
“No pressure,” I grumbled.
“You’ve had it pretty easy this year,” the ghost shot back. “You took care of your brother last fall, but everything you’ve gone after this year has been kinda small potatoes in comparison. Well, it’s time to get back in the game, Bubba-boy. The Spirit of Music needs you.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “I mean, look, this whole trip through musical memory lane has been cool, even if they weren’t my memories, but I don’t have any more of a clue what I’m supposed to do than I did when I left Nashville last night.”
“Well, that’s my job,” she said. She stood up and held out a hand. “Are you ready to see what’s in store for music if you fail?”
I wasn’t sure I was. This whole night was a damn confusing ride, and I didn’t know if I wanted to see any more. But if it gave me some clarity on what all these ghosts wanted me to do, I figured it was worth it.
I got up and took her hand, looking down at her bright blonde head. “I reckon I’m ready to go if you are.”
She started to wave her hand in the air, but I reached out and stopped her. “We don’t have to use the pyro to get there, do we? That shit gives me a headache.”
“No,” she said. “We can even skip the strobes, just this once.” She opened a portal in the air, this one rimmed with blue-green light.
I took a deep breath and stepped through, wondering what I was going to see on the other side that told me how to save music from the music industry.
11
I stepped out onto a barren field with piles of unraked leaves and a weather-beaten stage at one end. The whole place was deserted, but it was an enormous field, easily the size of a mid-sized college football stadium. I closed my eyes and could almost feel the energy of tens of thousands of people covering the grass, all jamming to blues, or bluegrass, or some kind of weed-infused jam band.
I walked toward the stage, and as I got right up to the front of it, I stepped on something hard under the carpet of brown leaves. I knelt down and brushed the leaves aside, feeling them crinkle under my touch and fall away to dust. Buried under years’ worth of fallen leaves and grass clippings was a wooden rectangle, paint faded away to almost nothing, but still recognizable, if just barely. I looked at the sign laying there in the grass and rocked back to sit on my heels.
“GrooveFest?” I asked, turning the ghost. �
�This is where Groovefest used to happen? Man, I’ve heard about that festival for years but never made it out here. Everybody played here—Steve Earle, Doc, Earl, Emmylou, Bela Fleck, Nickel Creek…everybody who was anybody in bluegrass or Americana music played here. What happened to this joint?” I looked around again, and there was nothing to see. No chairs, no crowds, no musicians waiting in the wings—nothing.
“It shut down,” the ghost said. “Too many artists got swept up in exclusive performance contracts and could only play in SuperSound venues, or SonicWorld concert halls, or some other joints that their record labels were in bed with, and the festival scene dried up because they couldn’t book diverse acts. The big venue management companies started their own festivals and stocked them with their headliners, and that ran the little guys into the ground.”
“That sucks,” I said. “This whole place was built out of musicians coming together to honor one of their own fallen friends.”
“I know,” she said. “This place saw some amazing collaborations over the years. Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs playing together in their 80s.”
“A New Grass Revival Reunion,” I said.
“Pete Seeger playing with his grandson in The Mammals,” she added.
“John Paul Jones wandering on stage to pick with Chris Thile,” I said. “And now it’s gone.”
“Now it’s gone,” she agreed.
“Shit,” I said.
“I couldn’t have said it better,” the ghost said with a nod.
I walked up the stairs to the side of the stage and looked out, staring over an expanse easily twice the size of the field at UGA, where I played college ball. I pictured it in my mind’s eye all full of people, men and women of all ages scattered into the reserved seats down front. Moms and dads, suburban yuppies settled in right next to mountain men and farm women, every one of them saving up for months to take a family music vacation. Then back behind that, I could almost see the general admission lawn with blankets and bag chairs and little mini-campsites set up as far as the eye could see.
“Yep, it looked about like that,” came the ghost’s voice from beside me.
“I didn’t hear you come up,” I said.
“Ghost, remember?” She grinned up at me.
I let out a sigh. “What’s next?”
“If you’re ready to find out, we can go,” the girl said, waving her hand. A hole opened up in the air, but there wasn’t any golden or purple light around this one. It was just a gray, featureless hole in the air, with all the color sucked out of it. Kinda like this place. I took a deep breath and stepped through.
Right into a cemetery. “Hey, isn’t this supposed to be the last thing I see before I wake up and go buy a turkey for Tiny Tim?”
The ghost smiled up at me and took my hand. “Yeah, but in that story the Ghost of the Future didn’t talk, and it’s a lot harder to make fun of you when I don’t talk, so I like this way better.”
She led me through the tombstones, and I read the names as I passed. It was a friggin’ Who’s Who of music legends, all recently passed on. I saw BB King, Lemmy Kilmeister, David Bowie, Prince, Johnny Cash with June Carter Cash right next to him, Doc Watson just a couple of stones down from his boy Merle, finally reunited after the father of the flat pickers passed on. I ran my fingers across the top of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s headstone, Natalie and Nat King Cole’s, Glenn Frey’s guitar-shaped monument, and then a string of rocks commemorating legends like Hank, Merle, and Waylon.
I didn’t even notice when I left the cemetery of musical geniuses and ended up walking through a real country graveyard. There were probably twelve rows of markers, about nine across, behind a white clapboard church with a gleaming white cross atop an old steeple. If anything in the world ever screamed “country church,” this was the place. I walked through the rows of Smiths, Barnhills, and Rathfields for a few long minutes before something started drawing me to a back corner of the cemetery. I walked up and down the rows until something in my gut told me I was in the right place, and I stopped in front of a plot with no stone, just a small commemorative marker the funeral home left behind.
I looked down at the little gray metal square holding a handwritten card, proclaiming this the final resting place of one George Buford Scatlin, of Pine Lick, West Virginia, born February 8, 1929, died November 2, 2016. There was no stone, no monument marking the resting place of one of the greatest fiddle players of all time, just a little chunk of tin and paper that would probably be destroyed the first time the groundskeeper rolled by on his big old riding Snapper mower.
I knelt down beside the almost unmarked grave and cried, right there in the grass. I cried for the kind old man dying alone in a nursing home without anyone knowing who he really was or what he had meant to so many people. I cried for all the people I’d lost in my life that I hadn’t let know what they meant to me before it was too late, and I cried for the soul of the world, a little bit darker without the magical music of Professor Fiddle. I ran out of tears after a bit, but I still stayed there on my knees feeling the dark red clay seep into the knees of my pants, thinking that I could hear, faint as an old train whistle buried underneath the cold November wind, the strains of “Orange Blossom Special” dancing along the mountaintops.
I looked up at the little ghost and said, “Why did you bring me here? Why show me this? I know he’s dying. I mean, shit, we all get old, if we’re lucky enough, but why did I need to see this?”
“I can’t tell you what to take from it, Bubba. I can just tell you that bullets and fists don’t solve every problem.”
“Shit, you think I don’t know that? That’s why I carry swords and fire.” I managed a laugh, trying not to blow snot-bubbles when I did. I don’t know why the old man’s grave hit me so hard. Maybe it was the lack of a mark. To many damn hunters I know ended up in a hole in the woods somewhere instead of all laid out in a nice cemetery, but even they got some kind of marker, even if it was just a little cairn of stones with a bullet on top of it. But Buford didn’t get any of that. He just got tossed in a hole somewhere the grass will get mowed, but not even a rock to mark his passing. It hit me wrong, somehow. This man dedicated his life to bringing joy to people; he deserved a more fitting tribute.
I stood up and looked at the little ghost. “I reckon you’ve got one more thing to show me?”
She gave me a look with a question mark on the end of it.
“This shit always comes in threes, right? There’s three of y’all, each showing me three things?”
“You’re almost right, there’s actually a couple more things, but brace yourself—this next one ain’t pretty.” She snapped her fingers, and I was sitting in my truck. Not bad, as far as transitions go, but the view was a little wrong. Then I understood—I was sitting in the passenger seat. Just as I started to slide over behind the wheel, the driver’s door opened, and I got into the truck.
Well, it was kinda me. It was me if my balls got cut off and the entire offensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers held me down and shaved me. I looked over at the man sliding his fat ass in behind the wheel and was absolutely horrified at what I saw there. I wore a blue dress shirt, a pair of khakis, and a sport coat. That wasn’t the worst thing in the world, I’d worn crap like that before when I was impersonating an FBI Agent going to a funeral.
No, something terrified me even more than the lack of beard, which exposed all the failings in my chin that I started hiding in high school, as soon as I could grow a beard. The absolute worst part, the thing that almost sent me screaming into the void, was my haircut.
I had a haircut. And not one of these “cut a couple inches off the end of the ponytail” haircuts that I get every few months when I start to sit on my hair. No, this was a “I have a real job, where people give a shit what I look like” haircut. Couple that with the clothes, the shave, and the shoes, which were a pair of penny loafers, and it all added up to Bubba having a legitimate job, with a boss that wasn’t, you know, the Pope.
&nb
sp; I watched myself as “I” reached up and pulled out a laminated ID card tucked underneath the sun visor. There was a picture of me on it, smiling like a moron and wearing an even worse necktie. “Rothsteen Security” was written across the top, above my picture, and below it said “Supervisor” in big red letters. I wasn’t just a Rent-A-Cop, I was a Rent-A-Cop middle manager.
I sat there, my mouth hanging open as this Bizarro Bubba closed the truck door, put on his seatbelt, and cranked up the truck. I felt the familiar rumble under my seat, then Opposite Me leaned forward and flicked on the radio. Instead of XM Outlaw Country, or a Sturgill Simpson CD, or even some Chris Stapleton blaring out of the speakers, there was a steady thump-thump-thump of a hip-hop beat with some redneck rapping over top of it.
I spun around in my seat. “Bro country? What kind of friggin’ horror movie is this where you think I’m ever gonna let damn Luke Bryan on the radio in my truck? That shit can’t stand, little Casper-ette. This shit cannot stand.”
“This ain’t the worst, Bubba. You think this is bad, let’s return to the original scene of the crime.” She snapped her fingers one more time, and she wasn’t lying—we were back at the place where I first started bitching about the state of music today and how it wasn’t like it used to be. We were standing on the sidewalk out front of the most holy place in the history of country music—the Ryman Auditorium.
“This can’t be good,” I muttered. “Of course, ain’t nothing you’ve shown me yet been good, so why should anything change now?”
“Well, I ain’t here to show you the sidewalk, so let’s get on inside,” my escort said, walking up the steps and passing through the door like it wasn’t even there.
I stood for a second, hung up once again on why she didn’t fall through the steps, until she stuck her head and shoulders through the door and said, “Come on, dumbass, it’s about to start!”
Oh Bubba, Where Art Thou? (Bubba the Monster Hunter Book 26) Page 7